A Place to Be: Brazilian, Guatemalan, and Mexican Immigrants in Florida's New Destinations

A Place to Be

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A Place to Be Brazilian, Guatemalan, and Mexican Immigrants in Florida’s New Destinations

EDITED BY

PHILIP J. WILLIAMS TIMOTHY J. STEIGENGA, AND MANUEL A. VÁSQUEZ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

A place to be : Brazilian, Guatemalan, and Mexican immigrants in Florida’s new destinations / edited by Philip J. Williams . . . [et al.]. p. cm. “This book is the product of a collaborative transnational research project that grew out of a workshop held at the University of Florida in .” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN ---- (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN ---- (pbk : alk. paper) . Latin Americans—Florida—Social conditions—Congresses. . Latin Americans—Florida—Religion—Congresses. . Transnationalism—Congresses. . Florida—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects—Congresses. I. Williams, Philip J., ‒ F.SP  .'—dc



A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright ©  by Rutgers, The State University Individual chapters copyright ©  in the names of their authors Map by Matthew Graham All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press,  Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ –. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

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vii

Introduction: Understanding Transnationalism, Collective Mobilization, and Lived Religion in New Immigrant Destinations

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PHILIP J. WILLIAMS, MANUEL A. VÁSQUEZ, AND TIMOTHY J. STEIGENGA

PART ONE

Transnational Lives: Networks, Families, and Solidarities across Borders 2

Beyond Homo Anomicus: Interpersonal Networks, Space, and Religion among Brazilians in Broward County

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MANUEL A. VÁSQUEZ

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From Jacaltenango to Jupiter: Negotiating the Concept of “Family” through Transnational Space and Time

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SILVIA IRENE PALMA, CAROL GIRÓN SOLÓRZANO, AND TIMOTHY J. STEIGENGA

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Solidarities among Mexican Immigrants in Immokalee

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PATRICIA FORTUNY LORET DE MOLA, MIRIAN SOLÍS LIZAMA, AND PHILIP J. WILLIAMS

PART TWO

Collective Mobilization and Empowerment 5

Transnationalism and Collective Action among Guatemalan and Mexican Immigrants in Two Florida Communities TIMOTHY J. STEIGENGA AND PHILIP J. WILLIAMS

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103

CONTENTS

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Immigrant Regime of Production: The State, Political Mobilization, and Religious and Business Networks among Brazilians in South Florida

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JOSÉ CLAÚDIO SOUZA ALVES

PART THREE

Identities and Lived Religion 7

Lived Religion and a Sense of Home: The Ambiguities of Transnational Identity among Jacaltecos in Jupiter

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TIMOTHY J. STEIGENGA, SILVIA IRENE PALMA, AND CAROL GIRÓN SOLÓRZANO

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Looking for Lived Religion in Immokalee

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PHILIP J. WILLIAMS AND PATRICIA FORTUNY LORET DE MOLA

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Brazilian and Mexican Women: Interacting with God in Florida

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PATRICIA FORTUNY LORET DE MOLA, LÚCIA RIBEIRO, AND MIRIAN SOLÍS LIZAMA

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A Place to Be: New and Old Geographies of Latin American Migration in Florida and Beyond TIMOTHY J. STEIGENGA, MANUEL A. VÁSQUEZ, AND PHILIP J. WILLIAMS

Contributors

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the product of a collaborative transnational research project that grew out of a workshop held at the University of Florida in . A planning grant from the Ford Foundation enabled us to hold of a series of workshops throughout  and  to discuss the project’s goals, theoretical issues, and research design and methodologies. In addition to our core team members, we are grateful to a number of scholars who participated in these workshops, including members of our advisory board (Roberto Goizueta, Lois Lorentzen, Otto Maduro, Verónica Melander, Robert Orsi, Omar McRoberts, and Kathryn Tanner) and scholars at the University of Florida and elsewhere (Allan Burns, Sheila Croucher, Caetana Maria Damasceno, Jorge Estuardo, Susan Gillespie, Luis León, Milagros Peña, David Smilde, and Alex Stepick). A generous grant from the Ford Foundation supported the research for this project and a series of outreach activities to benefit the immigrant communities that we studied. At the Ford Foundation, we are especially grateful to Constance Buchanan for all her guidance, encouragement, and support. At a December  conference in Antigua, Guatemala, our team members had the opportunity to present and discuss our findings with scholars and activists from immigrant communities. We thank especially the Instituto Centroamericano de Estudios de Desarrollo Económico y Social (INCEDES) for cosponsoring the conference and those scholars and activists who participated on panels: Manuel Ángel Castillo, Jerónimo Camposeco, Alejandro Frigerio, Heloisa Maria Galvão, Peggy Levitt, Joel Magallán, Robert Orsi, Brian Payne, Teresa Sales, and Richard Wood. We also thank the anonymous readers and Alex Stepick for their invaluable comments and suggestions on the manuscript. The Center for Latin American Studies and the departments of Political Science and Religion at the University of Florida supported graduate assistants who deserve mention for their contributions to the project: Julia Albarracín, Neda Bezerra, Martín Maldonado, Gayle Lasater, Anna Pagano, Ani de la Quintana, Rosana Resende, Iran Rodrigues, and Anouk St. Arnaud. We are also grateful for the hard work of many other people at the University of Florida, particularly, John Corr, our project manager; the late Myrna Sulsona, Margarita Gandía, Charles Wood, and Carmen Diana Deere at the Center for Latin American Studies; Michael Martinez vii

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and Debbie Wallen in the Department of Political Science; and David Hackett and Anna Peterson in the Department of Religion. At Florida Atlantic University (FAU), we would like to thank Sandra Ogden for her assistance in facilitating the details of our outreach workshops. A number of undergraduates at the Wilkes Honors College of FAU also deserve recognition for the many hours they spent working alongside our researchers both in the field and through their own honors thesis research. We extend a special thanks to Anya Canache, Karla Domínguez, Ariana Magdeleno, Jocelyn Sabbagh, and Sandra Lazo de la Vega. We are also grateful to Johanna Sharp for her extensive tri-lingual translation, coding, and data entry work on the survey portion of this project. The Brazilian team (Lúcia Ribeiro, José Claúdio Souza Alves, Keyla Thamsten, Anna Pagano, and Manuel Vásquez) would like to thank many people who kindly gave us access to their lives, homes, and congregations. Among Protestants, the team is particularly grateful to pastors Silair de Almeida, Francisco Pires, Riva, Ulisses, and Abraão, as well as to Etelmo. Among Catholics, the team extends its gratitude to fathers Vilmar, Carlos, Marcelo, and Sergio and lay leaders Beth, Sandra, Glória, Brasil Patinho, and Suely. At the Spiritist center, Maurício and Luide offered warm hospitality, while Marcello French and Pai Cornélio provided invaluable insights into African-based religions among Brazilian immigrants. Fausto Mendes da Rocha of the Brazilian Immigrant Center and Ilma Paixão of BRAMAS shared their knowledge of the Brazilian community in Boston to help the team understand comparatively the experiences in South Florida. Finally, Serginho and Renata of Brasliced and Luis Carlos of the Curso de Inglês assisted with new contacts. The Guatemalan team (Carol Girón Solórzano, Silvia Irene Palma, and Timothy Steigenga) owe a special debt of gratitude to the members and friends of CornMaya Inc. and the Jacaltec Association who welcomed us into their communities both in Jupiter and Jacaltenango. In Jupiter the team would like to express their deepest gratitude to Jerónimo Camposeco, Juan Patricio Silvestre, Marcos Cota Diaz, Auricio Camposeco, Antonio Gelacio Delgado, Mario Gervacio and Antonio Quiñones, Galindo Diaz, Pablo Hernández, Julia Guillermina Diaz, Darvi López, and Prudencio Camposeco. We also extend a special thanks to our friends and contacts in Indiantown: Andres Cruz and Antonio Silvestre. In Guatemala, we would like to acknowledge the support of the Latin American Social Science Faculty (FLACSO) in the early stages of the project and INCEDES for seeing it through to completion. Jacobo Dardón and Edit Gonzáles were especially supportive both logistically and academically, providing critical local knowledge in Guatemala. Mayor Moisés Pérez and the other political authorities in Jacaltenango facilitated our many visits to the region. We are particularly indebted to people of Jacaltenango and the surrounding areas for welcoming us into their homes and communities over the course of this study.

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The Mexican team (Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola, Mirian Solís Lizama, and Philip Williams) would like to thank a number of people who were instrumental during the field research stage of the project in Immokalee and Mexico. We are especially grateful to Damara Luce and Brian Payne for their hospitality and insight during our first visits to Immokalee and Elizabeth Juárez Cerdi for her participation in the research during the first year of the project. We extend our gratitude to María Márquez and Father Ettore Rubin of the Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church and Pastor Josué Rincón of the Bethel Assemblies of God Church. We also thank Lupita Rodríguez and Cristina Vázquez, who welcomed us into their homes and provided us with contacts in Chamácuaro, and Romeo Ramírez and Gerardo Reyes, who helped us to better understand the work of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. And finally, we are especially grateful to Hannoy Segura for her unending friendship and support during our research in Immokalee.

A Place to Be

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Introduction Understanding Transnationalism, Collective Mobilization, and Lived Religion in New Immigrant Destinations PHILIP J. WILLIAMS, MANUEL A. VÁSQUEZ, AND TIMOTHY J. STEIGENGA

This book explores processes of identity and community formation among Mexican, Guatemalan, and Brazilian immigrants in the “non-conventional destinations” of Immokalee, Jupiter, Pompano Beach, and Deerfield Beach in South Florida. The volume brings together the contributions of scholars from Latin America and the United States who, for the last four years, have engaged in an integrated, transnational research project to analyze systematically the challenges that these immigrant groups face, the resources they bring, and the collective strategies they deploy as they settle in places that have only recently been affected by large-scale immigration and/or that have received scant scholarly attention, since most of the research has concentrated on large gateway cities like New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Miami. Our collaborative project has been driven by three interconnected clusters of questions, relating to transnationalism, collective mobilization, and lived religion. Our previous work has shown that Latin American immigrants participate in economic, political, and religio-cultural networks that link societies of origin and settlement as a strategy to deal with the daunting challenges of globalization. In this project, we wanted to see if transnationalism is also affected by the dynamics of new destinations. To what extent is it possible and/or necessary for Latin American immigrants in new destinations to engage in transnational relations with their countries of origin while struggling to carve out new spaces of livelihood in the United States? In other words, does the need to establish themselves in hostile new destinations take precedence for new immigrants over the desire and demand to create transnational linkages? Is the precarious process of settlement facilitated or hindered by transnationalism? If transnationalism does exist among Latin American immigrants in new destinations, what forms does it assume and how is it played out differently among different national (and even sub-national) groups? 1

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Second, in light of the current anti-immigrant national mood and the frequently hostile local environments Latin American immigrants face as they move into new destinations, we were interested in the dynamics of community formation and collective political mobilization. What obstacles do immigrants confront and what resources are available to them to build collective solidarity and engage in collective action? Can immigrants afford to be visible in places that are unaccustomed to immigration? What are the conflicts and opportunities generated by this visibility? Finally, our research teams set out to document the multiple and complex roles that religion plays in the process of incorporation. Because religion has only recently begun to receive sustained attention in migration studies, we sought to explore the connections in new destinations between religious beliefs, practices, and organization and processes of immigrant community formation, collective political mobilization, and transnationalism. The focus on the interplay among transnationalism, collective mobilization, and religion in new destinations responds to emerging dynamics of Latino migration that are having a powerful impact not only in Florida, but throughout the United States, at a time when immigration is a controversial issue. Thus, we feel that our empirical case studies have national relevance. We now turn to these new patterns of Latino migration to frame our case studies.

The Larger Context: Latin American Immigrants in New Destinations Latinos have become the largest minority in the United States. According to the U.S. census, in  there were . million Hispanics, constituting  percent of the country’s total population. Fueled by internal growth—Latinos are a fairly young population, with a median age of . compared to . for Euro-Americans—and by ongoing migration from Latin America, Hispanics are projected to become  percent of the U.S. population by the year . Naturally, this rapid growth is bound to have a profound impact on American society, politics, and culture. However, the potential transformative power of Latinos is not just about sheer numbers. It is also about emerging patterns of settlement. Historically, Latinos have settled in traditional gateway states such as California, New York, and Texas and within those states in large cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Dallas, and Houston. Increasingly, however, Latinos are settling in new destinations, including many in the so-called New South. For example, between  and , new Latino destinations like Atlanta ( percent) and Orlando ( percent) experienced much faster growth rates than established Latino metro areas like Miami ( percent), New York ( percent), and Los Angeles ( percent). The shift in new destinations is also evident at the regional and state level. Between  and , the proportion of Latinos living in the South and

INTRODUCTION

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Midwest increased from . percent to . percent and . percent to . percent, respectively, while the proportion dropped in the West (from . percent to . percent) and Northeast (from . percent to . percent), the two regions where Latinos have traditionally settled. States experiencing the highest growth rates were located in the Southeast, led by North Carolina ( percent), Arkansas ( percent), Georgia ( percent), and Tennessee ( percent). In Florida, while the growth rate for the state between  and  was  percent, forty-seven of sixty-seven counties in Florida experienced growth rates over  percent. Moreover, the highest rates of growth were not in traditional gateways like Miami-Dade County, but in non-traditional counties in central and northern Florida. Although Florida is a “swing state,” it shares with other states in the New South a transformation from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, servicebased economy. As a region, during the s the Southeast was economically vibrant in an absolute sense and in comparison with traditional destinations for Latino immigrants. For example, the Southeast outpaced the national average annual growth rates in both personal income (. percent versus . percent) and employment (. percent versus . percent). Moreover, whereas in traditional gateway states like California, New York, and Illinois employment growth was below the national annual average, most states in the Southeast added jobs at a much faster rate than the national average. These trends contributed to the region’s growing attractiveness to Latino immigrants. As Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick’s influential City on the Edge demonstrates, Florida has had a significant history of migration, exemplified by the influx of Cubans before and after the revolution in  and by the more recent arrival of Nicaraguans and Haitians. Nevertheless, these migration flows until recently have been concentrated in Miami-Dade County. During the s, Florida’s population growth trailed only California and Texas, adding over three million new residents. As the population has continued to grow, propelled in part by large numbers of Euro-American retirees from the North, the pace of residential development outside Miami has accelerated. New inflows of immigrants from Latin America have come to provide the cheap labor and services needed to build and maintain these new suburbs and exurbs. Between  and , the Latino population in Florida grew from . to . million, while also becoming more diversified through the influx of immigrants from Mexico and Central and South America. According to the  census, Cubans accounted for  percent of Florida’s Latino population (down from  percent in ), followed by Puerto Ricans ( percent), Mexicans (. percent), South Americans ( percent), and Central Americans (. percent). Following the new residential development patterns, Latinos in Florida have begun to move northward, settling in significant numbers in places as diverse as Orlando, Naples, Jupiter, Lake Worth, Pompano Beach, and Deerfield Beach.

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In the meantime, a long-standing migration from Mexico and Central America to agricultural areas surrounding central and south Florida, such as Immokalee in Collier County and Indiantown in Martin County, has continued. Yet, this long-standing migration is also showing important transformations, with a diversification of communities of origin in Mexico and, perhaps more importantly, with increasing numbers of indigenous Mexicans from Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Hidalgo and Guatemalans from Huehuetenango. Within these hyper growth areas, Latinos often settle among rural, suburban, and exurban communities that are fairly homogeneous and do not have the wide array of social and cultural resources available to immigrants in traditional gateway cities. As a result, immigrants from Latin America have to build their own support networks and carve their own lived spaces, often in direct conflict with the communities of settlement. It is only very recently that the literature on immigration has begun to address the new geographies of Latino migration. The “new destinations” research has focused primarily on macroand micro-level explanations for the emergence of new gateways in the Midwest and South and ethnographic case studies on the impact of Latino immigration on individual communities of settlement. However, according to Mary Waters and Tomás Jiménez, “most of the existing literature is largely divorced from broader theoretical debates on immigration and assimilation.” Our volume seeks to fill this gap by bringing together a collection of essays generated from a single interdisciplinary project that explores comparatively processes of identity and community formation among Mexicans, Guatemalans, and Brazilians in three of Florida’s new destination communities. A brief discussion of the themes of transnationalism, collective mobilization, and lived religion frames the questions addressed in this volume and sets the stage for the individual chapters.

Transnationalism and Migration Studies The concept of transnationalism is not new. Randolph Bourne used it in his  article “Transnational America,” which appeared in Atlantic Monthly, to describe the United States’ evolving ethno-racial configuration and place in the emerging architecture of interstate relations in the wake of the First World War. Nevertheless, it can be argued that the term gained a new valence and a greater currency in the s as a fruitful tool to analyze the widening and thickening networks of exchange of goods, capital, and peoples across national borders that accompany the current phase of globalization. In international relations, the term transnationalism has preserved this macro focus, serving to describe the modus operandi of large capitalist enterprises like McDonald’s or Coca Cola, multilateral institutions such the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and nongovernmental organizations.

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However, the widespread intensification of migratory flows across national borders which has accompanied systemic changes during the last half century has foregrounded new forms of transnationalism, “transnationalisms from below” or “grassroots globalizations.” In an attempt to negotiate the demands of rapidly changing and globally integrated labor markets, immigrants have not only moved across national borders in increasing numbers, but now use technological advances ranging from the Internet and cellular phones to inexpensive air travel in order to tap strategically into the resources and networks available to them in their countries of origin. Yet, even as they manage to keep in close contact with their societies of origin, immigrants become integrated into their countries of settlement. This “bifocality” allows immigrants to draw from grassroots resources in multiple settings to cope with the new cartography ushered in by flexible production as well as with diverse phenomena such as civil wars, disorderly transitions to democracy, the decline of subsistence agriculture, rapid urbanization, and natural disasters. The rapid expansion of grassroots transnationalism has given impetus to an ethnographic turn in the study of this phenomenon. Beginning in the early s with Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc’s groundbreaking Nations Unbound: Transnational Migration, Postcolonial Predicaments, and the Deterritorialized Nation-State, a growing body of literature has explored how immigrants build relations across national borders, constructing realms of activity, thought, and feeling that bridge localities in two or more nation-states. According to the classic definition in Nations Unbound, transnationalism denotes “the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. We call these processes transnationalism to emphasize that many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders.” Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc call those immigrants engaged in multiple social relations spanning national borders “transmigrants.” They argue that “transmigrants take actions, make decisions, and develop subjectivities and identities embedded in networks of relationships that connect them simultaneously to two or more nation-states.” This classic definition has been refined and challenged in a proliferating literature, which has sought, among other things, to operationalize the concept, measure its intensity, durability, and overall incidence, as well as characterize the types of actors and practices and levels of institutionalization involved. At the theoretical level, three conceptual innovations stand out in the efforts to refine transnationalism as an analytical framework. The first one is the concept of a transnational social field, which Glick Schiller defines as “an unbounded terrain of interlocking egocentric networks,” a “network of networks that stretch across the borders of nation-states.” As immigrants attempt to sustain transnational livelihoods, they produce and reproduce networks, chains of

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social relations through which practices and material and symbolic goods flow, often unevenly, producing hierarchies and power asymmetries. Depending on factors such as their “thickness,” extensiveness, intensity, and level of institutionalization, these networks, in turn, carve out landscapes of experience, relationality, and power, spaces marked by a mixture of interdependence, altruism, mimesis, and exploitation, where immigrants lead their daily lives. In other words, although they are deterritorializing in the sense that they may be shaped by the nation-state but not coterminous with its boundaries, transnational social fields have a strong spatial dimension predicated on the power to build meaningful places to dwell and to articulate individual and collective identities across the networks. As we shall see in several chapters in this volume, particularly at a time of widespread nativism, the struggle to construct physical community and coherent selfhood is one of the great challenges of settlement in new destinations. Transnational networks play instrumental albeit differential roles in this construction. The second important theoretical innovation behind the concept of transnationalism is the notion of “social remittances,” which Peggy Levitt defines as “the ideas, behaviors, and social capital that flow from receiving to sending communities. They are the tools with which ordinary individuals create global culture at the local context.” The notion of social remittances allows us to move beyond purely economistic understandings of immigrant behavior. This notion enables scholars not only to examine monetary and non-monetary (i.e., services and consumer and durable goods) exchanges and their impact on local and national economies, but also to explore the sociocultural dimensions of living transnationally. In particular, the phenomenological and hermeneutic dimensions of existence across national borders, the questions of meaning, belonging, attachment to place, memory, nostalgia, imagination, psychological trauma, embodied experience, and expressive performance, which have traditionally been central to the study of religion, are brought to the fore. Several chapters in this volume point very poignantly to these dimensions of transnationalism, particularly to the work of religious and familial resources in dealing or failing to deal with dislocation and relocation in areas that are, if not outright hostile to immigrants, at least radically different from the communities of origin. The third and final theoretical innovation is the notion of “simultaneity,” or multiple embeddedness, which compels scholars to abandon the idea that it is fruitful to study the individual immigrant without making explicit reference to multiple contexts in which he or she is embedded, without taking into account his or her trajectory in the transnational social field. Manuel Vásquez and Marie Marquardt have argued that because religion usually seeks to link individual and community renewal with global transformation in the name of universal values, it is one of the institutions best suited to navigate multiple embeddedness. Most religions have a long tradition of operating transnationally, a fact

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that is reflected not only in their beliefs and symbols, but in their practices and forms of organization. Levitt has identified at least three types of transnational religious organizations. First, “extended transnational religious organizations” basically “broaden and deepen a global religious system that is already powerful and legitimate.” The prime example here is the Catholic Church, which is sustained by the complex interaction among the Vatican, the global religious order, the regional and national episcopal bodies, and the parish, all buttressed by a universalizing doctrine. The second type is “negotiated transnational religious organizations” that present a more flexible and decentralized form of organization. In these organizations, “relations between sending and receiving country churches evolve without a strong federated institutional structure or rules. Instead, individuals and organizations enter into informal agreements with one another that have weaker connections to political circles but are more flexible constituted.” The example here would be many small Pentecostal churches that have set up churches in the receiving country to minister to immigrants transnationally. Finally, there are “recreated transnational religious organizations” formed by “groups with guidance from home-country leaders” which seek to replicate local practices, beliefs, and modes of organization abroad; “these are franchiselike groups [that] are run by migrants who receive periodic resources, financing, and guidance from sending-country leadership while chapters are supported and supervised regularly by those who remain behind.” Examples of this last category would be the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, which emerged in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the Iglesia La Luz del Mundo, established in Guadalajara, Mexico, both of which have temples throughout Latin America and in the major cities in the United States. Contributors to this volume build on Levitt’s insights but go beyond them, examining the roles that religion plays in the process of multiple embeddedness when the new destinations in the migration trajectory are not used to the kind of forced cosmopolitanism entailed in transnational ways of being and belonging. For example, what does it mean to be Maya, to affirm one’s local traditions and language, surrounded by Ladinos and considered as Hispanic by the native Euro-American population? And how can this affirmation of Mayanness take place in a region like Palm Beach County, where migration from Latin America is only a recent phenomenon? What ideational and organizational precedents are there to negotiate simultaneity? At the methodological level, scholars of transnationalism have been accused of making “overextended claims” by sampling on the dependent variable, “focusing on instances where the phenomenon of interest is present, but not on those where it is absent. In this particular instance, qualitative studies were able to document the existence of immigrant transnationalism, but not its numerical incidence. Yet the very impetus generated by the early empirical

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findings led to their generalization to the entire immigrant population.” Responding to this critique, Levitt, Itzigsohn et al., and others have proposed ways to gauge the scope and intensity of transnationalism. They define as “core transnationalism” those activities that “(a) form an integral part of the individual’s habitual life; (b) are undertaken on a regular basis; and (c) are patterned and therefore somewhat predictable. ‘Expanded’ [or ‘broad’] transnationalism, in contrast, includes migrants who engage in occasional transnational practices, such as responses to political crises and natural disasters.” In other words, the task of measuring the frequencies and types of transnationalism involved in a particular case study is an empirical question. As Portes argues, “not all immigrants are ‘transmigrants’ and claims to the contrary needlessly weaken the validity of empirical findings on the topic. It is more useful to conceptualize transnationalism as one form of economic, political, and cultural adaptation that co-exists with other, more traditional forms.” However, this does not mean, as Portes suggests, that we have to delimit transnationalism only to “occupations and activities that require regular and sustained social contacts over time across national borders for their implementation.” He continues: “What constitutes truly original phenomena and, hence, a justifiable new topic of investigation, are the high intensity of exchanges, the new modes of transaction, and the multiplication of activities that require cross-border travel and contacts on a sustained basis.” For one thing, individuals are likely to be involved in core transnational activities in some realms of social life, while in others they might only engage in occasional transnational contacts. Still, when making daily decisions, they may think transnationally. Moreover, the balance of core and expanded transnational practices may change over time, in response to the demands of life cycle and to transformations in the societies of origin and settlement. Finally, since, as a social field, transnationalism touches the lives of not only immigrants but those in their kinship and community networks, including those who stay behind, it is not fruitful to delimit the concept too narrowly. Rather, we develop a flexible concept that allows us to study empirically the multiple forms of transnationalism without it becoming a catchall category. Our contribution to this discussion is in assessing the scope, intensity, and morphology of transnationalism in nontraditional immigrant destinations. Does the fact that there are not solidified immigrant pathways that facilitate settlement and integration encourage reliance on transnational networks? If so, what kind of transnational linkages tend to be favored—kinship linkages or transnational circuits? Can we speak of what Thomas Faist calls transnational communities in new destinations? Does an inhospitable context of reception compel the immigrants to concentrate on survival in the society of settlement rather than to spend their resources cultivating transnational relations? Is the immigrant group’s level of social and cultural capital, particularly as manifested

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in ethnic solidarity and membership in a religious community, more crucial in building transnational linkages in the contexts of nontraditional destinations? And finally, how does transnationalism assist or hinder attempts by immigrant groups to mobilize around their collective interests? This final question leads us to another of our primary themes; the issue of immigrant mobilization in new destinations.

Immigrant Mobilization As the new geography of Latino immigration continues to expand in the United States, questions about how and when immigrants can successfully organize to promote their local interests have become increasingly urgent. The rapid growth of the immigrant population in new destinations has fuelled increasing hostility toward immigrants, as evidenced by the highly polarized debates about immigration at the national level and the increasing number of state laws and local ordinances directed against undocumented immigrants. In response to these initiatives, Latino immigrants have begun to mobilize in unprecedented numbers, dramatized by the massive mobilizations that took place in April and May . Even more astonishing than the size of the protests was the large number of protests organized in new destinations in the Midwest and South. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a comprehensive review of the literature on social movements and identity politics. Our goal is more modest: we would like to offer enough elements to highlight the larger implications of our case studies for immigrant collective action. The first element we need to factor in is the macro-context in which immigrants seek to mobilize. This structural and systemic context is defined by the deepening and expansion of neoliberal capitalism in the Americas. Following Arjun Appadurai, we conceptualize immigrant mobilizations as local responses to the disjunctures and dislocations related to globalization. Within the context of deepening economic globalization, “the rise of technocratic policy-making, the decline of trade unions, the growing disillusionment with political parties and elections, and the dismantling of the welfare state” have led to a growing gap between government and citizens in both Latin America and the United States. Appadurai refers to the new forms of resistance that have emerged to challenge and reverse these developments as examples of “grassroots globalization” or “globalization from below” that are concerned with “mobilizing specific local, national, and regional groups on matters of equity, access, justice, and redistribution” in the face of “increased inequalities within and across societies.” These emergent forms of resistance are often locally oriented, as in the case of the labor center initiative in Jupiter (as outlined in chapter ) or efforts to organize against city ordinances targeting undocumented immigrants. However, they can also develop self-consciously global strategies, as with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, that link together

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people and organizations across borders “by shared values, a common discourse, and dense exchanges of information and services.” Roger Rouse, from a neo-Marxist perspective, warns of the limitations to transnational activism rooted in identity politics. He argues that the shift from a national toward a “transnational regime of accumulation” has produced significant changes in the structure of class relations and a marked increase in social inequalities. Immigrants, women, and people of color, while gaining some representation in the expanding professional-managerial class, disproportionately populate the ranks of the “secondary sector proletariat and the reserve army.” According to Rouse, for the state and bourgeoisie to maintain a transnational system of accumulation, they have adopted political and cultural strategies that encourage people to express dissent through identity-based forms of organizing instead of more radical class-based movements. The resulting growth in idioms of identity has “intensified the processes by which people have been discouraged from bringing issues of exploitation to the fore alongside questions of prejudice and discrimination.” The idioms of racial and ethnic difference that infuse the discourse in support of anti-immigrant initiatives like California’s Proposition  or the more recent Sensenbrenner bill (H.R. ) are an important source of “defensive” identities, or what Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut refer to as “reactive ethnicity.” According to Portes and Rumbaut, “reactive ethnicity is the product of confrontation with an adverse native mainstream and the rise of defensive identities and solidarities to counter it.” In turn, reactive ethnicity can provide the basis for collective solidarity and mobilization in opposition to attempts to crack down on undocumented immigration. As we will see in chapter , whereas in Jupiter a hostile context of reception combined with greater ethnic homogeneity fosters mobilization based in reactive ethnicity, in Immokalee, ethnic heterogeneity and economic deprivation combined with a less hostile community can produce multi-ethnic, class-based mobilization. Moreover, for first-generation rural immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala, reactive ethnicity can also foster transnational organizations that are aimed “at improving material and political conditions in their places of origin.” The question is whether these reactive movements can move beyond “defensive identities” to produce “project identities” that lead to more far-reaching structural transformation. Traditional concepts of mobilization may not be as appropriate for studying immigrants in new destinations, especially undocumented immigrants. In discussing the case of Mexican immigrants in northern California, Rouse writes that in response to the state’s “politics of identification” most immigrants simply try to “elude the machinery of identification or to neutralize its impact.” They do their best “to avoid the reach of agencies seeking to identity them and [give] elusive answers to anyone who seemed official.” Many have to obtain false documents, living under other people’s identities for varying periods of

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time. Rather than participating in organized collective action to further their interests, undocumented immigrants are more likely to develop and maintain personal, family, religious, and labor networks to address their everyday problems. Given the purposeful invisibility of many undocumented immigrants and their social networks, focusing only on the most visible markers of collective mobilization may provide an incomplete picture. Alberto Melucci provides an alternative two-pole model of mobilization: latency and visibility. According to this model, most immigrants are involved in “submerged networks,” which constitute a system of exchange within which persons and information circulate. These networks are usually latent but can burst into the open over specific issues, as in the case of the April and May  massive mobilizations in opposition to the Sensenbrenner bill. As we will see in chapters  and , a focus on submerged networks provides a useful corrective to the normative assumptions underlying the contested and problematic concept of “community.” The notion of community assumes that associational life must have visible and institutionalized expressions such as ethnic, civic, or neighborhood organizations. The absence of these manifestations is understood as a social pathology, a condition of anomie with low levels of social interdependence and solidarity. Given the assumptions behind the notion of community, relying on this concept to understand social life in new destinations may result in erroneous conclusions. In new destinations, where Latin American immigrants cannot tap into pre-established networks built by previous migrant waves and where they often confront hostile environments, the lack of visible and institutionalized expressions of community life should not be automatically taken to be mean that there is no sociality among immigrants or that they are not interested in building connections with their compatriots and co-ethnics. In fact, not building visible forms of political organization might be a defensive strategy by recent immigrants to remain invisible, to continue to work, study, play, and pray without calling the attention of a native population that, at best, feels deeply ambivalent toward them. For example, among Brazilian immigrants in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach, although there are few visible markers of community organization and mobilization, we found a vibrant and diverse array of interpersonal networks among which Brazilians feel protected and “at home.” To the extent that these networks extend beyond the household or the intimate circle of friends, they do so only by connecting with churches and small businesses, almost never venturing into the political arena, which is perceived as time-consuming, baffling, and dangerous. The existence of a thick social infrastructure leads Manuel Vásquez, in chapter , to challenge the traditional readings of Brazilians abroad as uniquely anomic. Whether latent and submerged networks may provide the resources necessary to stage public mobilizations is an open question. Most scholars of social movements recognize that social networks “are the most common sources of

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recruitment into social movements.” However, the challenge is to build the “connective structures” between interpersonal and local networks and sources of power at more macro levels. In the face of these obstacles to mobilization, what resources can immigrants draw upon to mount successful collective challenges? Various chapters in this volume explore the role of social capital in immigrant mobilization. Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant define social capital as “the sum of resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.” The accumulation of social capital can enable some immigrants and their families to increase and diversify their social networks and to enjoy socioeconomic advancement. However, for many immigrants, limited social capital, combined with their undocumented status and weak social networks, undermines their opportunities for social mobility. Some scholars have found that social capital grounded in tightly knit ethnic communities can provide important resources in confronting obstacles to socioeconomic advancement. This is especially true for immigrants of limited means. However, as Cecilia Menjı´var argues in her study of Salvadoran immigrants in San Francisco, social networks will not automatically result in social capital: “social capital cannot be generated automatically when immigrants do not have access to desirable resources, because reciprocal obligations are undermined under these conditions.” With average annual earnings of approximately $,, migrant farmworkers have few possibilities to accumulate the kind of economic, social, or symbolic capital available to other types of immigrants. Although much of the literature on social capital emphasizes the benefits of cooperation, Portes points to studies that identify several negative consequences, including the exclusion of outsiders, excess claims on group members, constraints on individual freedom, and downward leveling norms. Social capital generated by bounded solidarity among more established immigrants is sometimes used to exclude newer immigrants from the economic advantages of group membership. For example, the Cuban immigrant community in Miami is often cited as an example of a successful ethnic enclave, where co-ethnic solidarity has facilitated the economic and political ascendance of Cuban immigrants. According to Portes and Stepick, “the common circumstance of exile and a common experience of successive political defeats . . . cemented a strong sense of ‘we-ness’ ” and the consolidation of a “moral community.” Similarly, in chapter  we will see how a group of Otomı´ immigrants from Hidalgo, Mexico, has constructed a “transnational moral community” that rests upon a system of shared meanings, norms, and practices rooted in a strong ethnic identity that links them to their place of origin. However, while membership in these moral communities defines to a large extent who receives access to jobs and business loans, other immigrant groups are largely excluded from the benefits of

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membership, thus creating potential barriers to the emergence of more inclusive Pan-Latino organizations. Recent literature on religion and social capital also tends to emphasize the more positive consequences of social capital. Robert Putnam, in his widely cited book Bowling Alone, argues that religious organizations “are arguably the single most important repository of social capital in America” and religiosity is a powerful correlate of civic engagement. Similarly, in his study of faith-based community organizing in the United States, Richard Wood argues that churches often provide a reservoir of social capital developed over the years through faceto-face interactions during worship, prayer, and Bible study groups. The networks that churches make available to members can “enhance feelings of social solidarity, provide formal and informal help in times of need, and give participants access to whatever resources those links come with.” Following Putnam and others, we distinguish between “bonding” social capital and “bridging” social capital. Bonding social capital is inward oriented and tends to reinforce group identity, as in the case of the bounded solidarity of Miami Cubans or Otomíes from Hidalgo. Strong social bonds within communities can provide the foundation on which immigrants “can develop the capacity to address the problems of poverty” and “to achieve a measure of control over their lives.” In contrast, bridging social capital can facilitate “links among communities that frequently coexist in relative isolation from one another.” Because churches are embedded in broader networks—denominational ties, links to other churches and community organizations, relations with government agencies—they often serve as an important source of these bridging ties. However, churches will vary in the degree to which they emphasize withingroup networks (bonding social capital) as opposed to networks outside the congregation (bridging social capital). Despite the important role that religion can play in fostering social capital, it is important not to exaggerate its transformative potential. In an essay on religious change and social capital in Peru and Guatemala, Daniel Levine and David Stoll acknowledge that the gap between empowerment and power can be a longterm process. Building on Putnam’s use of the concept of social capital, Levine and Stoll argue that religious activism must first concentrate on accumulating social capital before engaging in political activism. If the move from religious to political activism occurs before the establishment of bonds of solidarity and trust, then grassroots movements are unlikely to accomplish their goals. Similarly, Michael Foley and Dean Hoge, in their study of religion and new immigrants in Washington, D.C., point out that churches can “vary both in the civic skills cultivated and in the degree to which these might transfer to actual participation in the political system.” For religious activism to have political significance, it needs to go beyond social capital and “foster attitudes and behaviors that actually influence

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regimes in some way.” Whereas social capital “is useful in understanding the role of religious organizations dedicated to individual redemption or community self-help activism, it is less helpful in studying social movements committed to social justice and political transformation.” Following John Booth and Patricia Richards, it is important to distinguish between social capital and “political capital” that refers to attitudes and behavior that influence government or public policy in some way. The concept of political capital is more appropriate to understanding the civic skills and political competences developed within social movements and deployed for political ends. As we will see in chapter , unlike churches, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers creates social capital not only for the personal empowerment of its members, but for the purpose of enhancing the organization’s political influence and power. As we engaged in our research in Florida’s new destinations, we hoped to uncover and analyze the contextual elements that make immigrant mobilization more or less successful, the factors that motivate immigrants to mobilize to pursue their collective interests, the tools they have at their disposal to achieve their goals, and the implications of various forms of immigrant mobilization. In particular, we wanted to know how religious institutions, practices, and beliefs promote or hinder immigrant mobilization and community formation. In the process of exploring these questions, we found ourselves drawn directly into the study of “lived religion,” the study of how immigrants from Latin America practice their religion in everyday life and the sociopolitical implications of these practices.

Lived Religion and Immigration Understanding what is meant by “lived religion” requires a brief historical overview of the evolution of this concept in the fields of religious studies and sociology of religion. Until recently, the study of religion and social change has been dominated by the secularization paradigm. While this paradigm takes many forms, its core claim is that there is a close correlation between the process of modernization and religion’s retreat from the public sphere. In the face of the structural changes brought about by modernization (urbanization, industrialization, differentiation, and individualism), religion becomes fragmented, privatized, and rationalized. Thus, modern societies characteristically do not have an overarching “sacred canopy” that frames all aspects of social life. Rather, they present a plethora of religions, all making competing and ultimately unsuccessful claims to universality. Eventually, such an approach predicts the correlation between the advance of modernization and declining rates of church affiliation and participation, as is evident in western Europe. The secularization paradigm has yielded valuable insights into the relation between religion and immigration. For example, Renato Poblete and Thomas O’Dea draw from this paradigm to explain the rapid rate of conversion

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to evangelical Protestantism among Puerto Rican Catholics who arrived in large cities in the Northeast, such as New York and Philadelphia, as part of the “great migration” (–). A recent survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Hispanic Center also seems to validate some of the predictions of the secularization paradigm. On the one hand, the accentuated trend toward a charismatic Christianity among Latinos, which Poblete and O’Dea observed in the s and ’s, continues. On the other hand, there are growing numbers of Latinos who are not affiliated with or do not participate in any churches. Thus, the raw numbers might be interpreted as a validation of the secularization hypotheses. But this is not the only interpretation. Since many Latinos are interested in achieving a piece of the American dream, they often work long hours, frequently at two or even more jobs. The heavy work schedule leaves precious little time and energy to become involved in a religious organization. Latinos may, instead, choose to spend their free time at the park, playing soccer or baseball, or at home watching television. The lack of participation in established religious organizations does not mean that Latinos have rejected religion altogether. Rather, they may be developing their own forms of “spirituality” that take place in different contexts. Before we flesh out the notion of lived religion, we need to introduce the “New Paradigm” (NP), which emerged in the early s, following the publication of Stephen Warner’s landmark essay. For, in challenging the core assumptions of the secularization paradigm, the NP paved the way for a renewed focus on religious vitality, creativity, and innovation. To demonstrate that secularization is not an irreversible structural process that is pushing religion out of the public arena, NP theorists point to the strength of religion throughout the world, from the rapid growth of evangelical Christianity in Latin America and Africa to the spread of Islamic “fundamentalism” in the Middle East, in Asia, and among immigrants in Europe and to the rise of Hindutva in India and the Hindu diaspora. In particular, NP theorists hold up the United States, a country that is simultaneously hypermodern and highly religious, as a fatal anomaly that the secularization model cannot explain. Taking the United States as its point of departure, the NP holds that there is no contradiction between religious pluralism and religious vitality. In fact, religion is at its most vibrant in a pluralistic setting that encourages the religious producers to innovate and improve their products in order to maintain their edge vis-à-vis competitors. Thus, in contrast to the claims of the secularization paradigm, which assumes that religion is at its strongest in a monopolistic situation, when there is a single sacred canopy, the NP states that religious monopolies are highly susceptible to decay because there is no incentive for innovation and entrepreneurship. As part of its effort to show empirically how religion thrives in a pluralistic setting, the NP has focused on congregations, arguably the most visible form of

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religious organization made possible by the separation of church and state in the United States. Whereas the secularization paradigm has tended to favor quantitative methods to measure church attendance and religious affiliation, the focus on congregations has led the NP to adopt a more ethnographic method. The best work done under the general rubric of the NP, in fact, includes rich descriptions of the local practices of believers as they build and maintain community. These practices often blend religious and civic dimensions, thus contributing not only to a vibrant religious pluralism but to democracy. In its stress on the practitioner’s agency and creativity and on the public impact of religious life, New Paradigm is, thus, a precursor to the lived religion school. Through its focus on congregations, the NP has also offered useful tools to study how immigrants transform established institutions and/or construct their own as they settle in the United States. It is clear that the concepts of social capital, moral community, ethnic enclave, and networks, which we highlighted above in the section on collective mobilization, dovetail nicely with the focus on congregations. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, Latino immigrants rely heavily on congregations as they move to a new destination. Unlike traditional gateway cities that often have an array of civic and advocacy organizations developed over the years to service and incorporate new immigrant groups, new destinations generally lack the institutional infrastructure designed to serve immigrant populations. In such a context, congregations can provide important material and moral support for immigrants and serve as an important source of social norms and values in a sometimes hostile environment. Some of the findings in the Pew survey confirm the wisdom of the New Paradigm’s focus on congregations to understand how religion works for Latino immigrants. For example, it found that Latino religion is “distinctively ethnic. Two thirds of Latino worshipers attend churches with Latino clergy, services in Spanish and heavily Latino congregations. While most predominant among foreign born and Spanish speakers, Hispanic-oriented worship is prevalent also among native born and English-speaking Latinos. That strongly suggests that the phenomenon is not simply a product of immigration or language but that it involves a broader and more lasting form of ethnic identification.” For all the New Paradigm’s strengths, it suffers from significant weaknesses. First, theorists working within this paradigm tend to understand congregations as coherent subcultures with clear, even if porous, boundaries. Our research will show that congregations are not only embedded in “local ecologies” or “religious districts.” In addition to being located in particular socioeconomic contexts and religious fields, congregations are also crisscrossed by transnational networks linking multiple nodes. For example, religious lay leaders may create hometown associations as one aspect of their congregational work, to collect funds to rebuild the church in their village of origin or to send bodies for burial in the homeland or to sponsor and organize transnational celebrations of the

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patron saint, as we describe in chapters  and . Consequently, “congregations” do not fit within a single template nor do they necessarily take on the “congregational form” often associated with American Protestant churches. A transnational prism, thus, offers a fruitful way to contextualize congregational ethnographies. Transnationalism allows us to explore the production, circulation, and consumption of religious practices and worldviews across spatiotemporal arrangements that include but are not reducible to bounded congregations. To map out the multi-scalar practice of religion, several of our contributors use the trope of networks or a transnational social field, conceptualizing congregations as important territorialized nodes. The second weakness of the focus of the NP has to do with the fact that not all public and material expressions of religion are congregational. The vast majority of the immigrants we studied in South Florida are not reached by or intensely involved in congregations. Rather, because of geographical dispersal, busy work schedules, the demands to be mobile, and the fear to be visible in an increasingly anti-immigrant climate, Latin American immigrants are more likely to “do religion” at home, school, workplace, and other settings where they carry out their daily routines, very often among other immigrants. In many cases, these spaces of everyday life are linked to congregations. Yet, these links tend to be tenuous, ephemeral, and sporadic, depending on the changing needs of the life cycle or the challenges of their immigrant trajectories. In order to go beyond the New Paradigm’s narrow focus on congregations and the creativity of religious entrepreneurs, our teams draw from the lived religion approach, which seeks “to study how particular people, in particular places and times, live in, with, through, and against the religious idioms available to them in culture.” The lived religion approach builds on and goes beyond previous studies on “popular” religion. The concept of popular religion has tended to emphasize the tension between orthodoxy and heresy, between institutional domination and lay, grassroots resistance. Particularly, in Latin America, the concept was traditionally read through a class-based prism that understood the religious beliefs and practices of the common people as either reproducing or contesting the hegemony of religious and secular elites. The lived religion approach takes up some of these concerns but shifts the stress to the phenomenological description of everyday practices. The lived religion approach is primarily interested in exploring how practitioners (both clergy and laity) materialize, embody, and emplace religion as they engage each other in daily life. Since lived religion scholars see religion as ways of being in the world, they argue that “religion cannot be understood apart from its place in everyday lives, preoccupations, and commonsense orientations of men and women.” “Crafted and recrafted by many hands, in many different places, and in contradictory circumstances, religious media constitute the way living people experience and construe events in their social world (war, economic distress, the

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organization and experience of work, to cite three examples) and perennial human problems (always encountered within specific historical frames, although never completely and securely so).” Thus, the lived religion approach seeks to develop textured, reflexive ethnographic accounts of “the experiences and beliefs of people in the midst of their lives, to encounter religion in its place in actual men and women’s lived experience, in the places where they live and work.” As part of the qualitative focus on everyday existence, lived religion scholars have paid particular attention to the practices of women, who among immigrants often deal most directly with the needs of their children and the struggles to preserve family and cultural traditions. Robert Orsi, for example, found that, amid the turmoil caused by the Great Depression in the s and the Second World War, women turned to Jude, the saint of the hopeless causes, “in socially defined roles, identifying themselves in their petitions as daughters, mothers, and wives praying for husbands, parents, and children.” Here, in its focus on family and its embeddedness in sociopolitical realities, the lived religion approach dovetails with the growing literature on religion and gender in Latin America. This literature documents how women draw from their religious traditions to curb destructive behaviors and social forces that threaten to dismantle the family and, in the process, empower themselves without directly challenging male dominance. In chapter , Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola, Lúcia Ribeiro, and Mirian Solı´s Lizama build on this literature to show how religion helps Brazilian and Mexican women to deal with the dislocations produced by migration and settlement in new destinations, allowing them to articulate “intermediate spaces” between the public and private spheres. In approaching religion, all the contributors to this volume have taken to heart the lived religion school’s call to focus on everyday practices and narratives. However, we have sought to locate these practices and narratives within the larger institutional context, showing their interplay with national and transnational sociopolitical and religious dynamics. This embedding shows the fragility of lived religion. For many Latino immigrants, especially for those who come to a hostile new destination where they are subject to exploitative labor arrangements, it is not just generating congregational life that is nearly impossible. Even engaging in quotidian religious practices is extremely difficult. The question then arises: Given the structural and existential constraints to religious life that Latinos face in many new destinations, to what extent is religion an important variable in the process of migration and settlement? We will return to this question in the conclusion, once we have discussed different ways in which religion interacts with transnationalism, collective mobilization, and integration. Having laid out the key questions that drive this volume as well as the larger context and the theoretical framework that orient the collaborative project, we

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would like now to characterize the communities that served as our case studies and the methodologies we used to explore them.

New Faces, New Places, and Transnational Methodology From  to , our interdisciplinary research teams undertook fieldwork in Florida and in selected communities of origin in Brazil, Mexico, and Guatemala. We believed that a research strategy combining ethnographic methods with survey research would provide a more solid basis for our comparative study. In each of these locations, we utilized a range of qualitative methods including participant observation, in-depth interviews, oral histories, and focus groups with men, women, and youths, as well as with church and civic activists. Based upon our first rounds of qualitative work and community mapping, we then designed a survey instrument and collected survey data across the Florida communities under study. Because Guatemalans and Mexicans are highly concentrated in Jupiter and Immokalee, we were able to conduct random surveys based on census tracks. However, because Brazilians are widely dispersed within the significantly larger populations of Deerfield and Pompano, we utilized a snowball technique for the Brazilian sample. Thus, while our survey data for Brazilians yields useful comparisons with the other groups, the data cannot be assumed to be broadly representative of the over-all Brazilian population. Several factors justify our choices of immigrant groups and sites to study. In terms of our target groups, we wanted first to compare and contrast the dynamics of settlement in new destinations for relatively recent immigrants from Latin America, such as Brazilians and Guatemalans, and the older, more established immigrants from Mexico. Second, we sought to break new ground by examining comparatively the experiences of Brazilians with those of other immigrants from Latin America. Except on the issue of race, Brazilian immigrants have thus far been studied in isolation from other groups in the hemisphere. By studying Brazilians, who tend to include both men and women and show more diversity in socioeconomic status and level of formal education, side by side with Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants, who are predominantly single men with few years of formal education, we are able to highlight the impact of the variables of gender and class in the migration and incorporation process. Third, including Guatemalans in our study allows us to focus on the specific contributions of ethnicity, particularly indigenous identities, in the articulation of political, religious, and transnational practices. And since Guatemalans and Mexicans overlap in their settlement patterns, we can study variations and similarities between these two groups in the same localities. In terms of the choice of research sites, our selection of Jupiter, Immokalee, Deerfield Beach, and Pompano Beach allowed us to examine community formation in a variety of spatial scales and geographic logics. In particular, we were

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P. WILLIAMS, M. VÁSQUEZ, AND T. STEIGENGA

interested in exploring the differential impact of a rural setting like Immokalee (dominated by Mexican migrant farm workers) versus suburban and exurban spaces (like Jupiter for Guatemalans and Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach for Brazilians) on the process of settlement. We believed that a mix of newdestination contexts would make the findings of our project more useful for the ongoing national debate on immigration. Throughout the United States, Latino populations are experiencing the fastest rates of growth not in the large traditional gateway cities but in rural, suburban, and exurban regions that have much in common with our three communities in Florida. A brief description of the three communities and the primary immigrant groups we studied in each helps to draw out the commonalities with other new destinations for Latino immigration.

Guatemalans and Mexicans in Jupiter Jupiter, Florida, is a relatively small (with a population of approximately forty thousand) coastal city on the northern edge of Palm Beach County, less than ten miles north of West Palm Beach. A popular winter vacation destination for “snowbirds” from the Northeast, Jupiter was in the midst of a sustained housing and construction boom during the course of our fieldwork. The construction industry, lawn-and-garden industry, and the golf course industry rely heavily on immigrant (primarily Guatemalan and Mexican Mayan) labor. Each day, hundreds of day-laborers crowded the sidewalk and parking lots in front of apartments on a local throughway (Center Street), waiting for contractors and private individuals to arrive and offer work. As in other small communities from New York State to Georgia, these gatherings became the focus of increasing tensions in the primarily Anglo community, forcing town authorities to initiate a series of meetings and policy changes to address the tensions surrounding the growing immigrant community. The majority of Jupiter’s immigrants come from rural areas in northern Guatemala (primarily Huehuetenango, with  percent of those we sampled in our survey research) and southern Mexico (Chiapas, with nearly  percent). Based on interviews with key informants, we estimate that approximately , of Jupiter’s , Guatemalan immigrants come from the town of Jacaltenango and its surrounding aldeas in northwestern Guatemala. We thus traced the transnational connections back from Jupiter and conducted field research in the primary communities of origin as well. The first Jacaltecos arrived in Jupiter after a long and intense displacement between countries (Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States) and between various locations within the United States. They arrived in Florida for diverse reasons: from the need to safeguard their lives in the context of Guatemala’s intense armed conflict of the s, to more recent waves of immigrants who have come primarily as international migrant workers, to fill the demand for laborers in

INTRODUCTION

21

Jupiter’s burgeoning landscaping and construction industries. Since , the Guatemalan immigrant population in Jupiter has grown rapidly as economic conditions in Guatemala and southern Mexico have deteriorated, the demand for immigrant labor has continued to grow, and transnational family and labor networks have become institutionalized between Jupiter and Jacaltenango.

Mexicans and Guatemalans in Immokalee Immokalee (population ,) is located in Collier County in southwest Florida, very close to the Everglades. Beginning in the s and ’s, Immokalee and surrounding areas came to play a major role in Florida’s agricultural expansion. Today southwest Florida accounts for more than  percent of the state’s citrus production and more than  percent of its tomato production. During the harvest season (November through April), the population can swell to ,, while during the off-season it decreases by about a half. Although up until the s the permanent labor force in Immokalee was primarily Euro-American and the migrant labor force predominantly African American, today Immokalee’s population is overwhelmingly Latino. Immokalee has become a major gateway for migrant workers entering the East Coast agricultural labor stream and an important crossroads for Mexican immigrants to Florida. According to the  census, the population is  percent Hispanic (almost  percent of whom are of Mexican origin and  percent Guatemalan),  percent Caucasian,  percent Haitian,  percent African American, and . percent Native American. Our survey of Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants in Immokalee highlights the geographic diversity and mobility of the immigrant population, with large concentrations from Oaxaca (. percent) and Chiapas (. percent), Mexico, the next largest from Guanajuato, Mexico (. percent), and Huehuetenango, Guatemala (. percent), and the remainder primarily spread throughout the other Mexican states. Moreover,  percent of respondents said that they had lived elsewhere in the United States, and  percent reported frequently traveling to other states. The arrival of increasing numbers of immigrants from indigenous communities in southern Mexico is representative of the new geography of Mexican immigration. In this sense, Immokalee is both an old and new destination—an old destination for immigrants from traditional sending states in central and western Mexico and a new destination for immigrants from nontraditional sending states from southern Mexico.

Brazilians in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach Pompano Beach (population ,) and Deerfield Beach (population ,) are two cities at the northern edge of Broward County. The area is heavily populated by a combination of Euro-American and Canadian “snowbirds,” who come during the winter to enjoy the warm weather and the beaches, and middle-class families that have moved north to find affordable housing, while still being relatively

22

P. WILLIAMS, M. VÁSQUEZ, AND T. STEIGENGA

close to Miami (separated by between thirty-five and forty miles). As in many of the new destinations for Latino immigration throughout the United States, Brazilians are a largely “hidden” community, dispersed throughout the area and intermingled with other Hispanic groups. It is impossible to state with certainty the number of Brazilians in these two cities. According to the  census, Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach have a total of approximately , residents of Latino/Hispanic descent who are not of Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban origin. However, most local leaders estimate the Brazilian population to fall between , and ,. Our non-randomized survey found that Brazilian migration to the area is fairly recent:  percent of our respondents indicated that they came to the region only after  (with close to half of those stating that they arrived after ). While we met immigrants from virtually all states of Brazil, our sample included a heavy presence of Mineiros ( percent) and Cariocas (from Rio de Janeiro at  percent), and Paulistas ( percent). This breakdown mirrors the patterns found in older migration flows to New York and Boston. Our survey respondents were also relatively young ( percent in the twenty- to thirty-nine-year-old range) and educated ( percent have completed at least eight years of schooling and nearly half of those affirmed to have finished high school), and close to  percent self-identified as white when asked to list their race. About  percent told us that their occupations in Brazil required a significant level of qualification. Among those surveyed, we found lawyers, doctors, teachers, dentists, business administrators, and entrepreneurs. In terms of occupation in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach, Brazilians are all well represented in the service and construction sectors of the local economy. For men, the most common jobs are roofing, dry-walling, landscaping, and working at restaurants either as dishwashers, busboys, or delivery drivers. For women, it is cleaning, both of private homes and of the many condominiums and hotels in the region, as well as waitressing. Some Brazilian women also take care of retired, elderly people, helping with transportation, shopping, and other domestic chores. While  percent of respondents in our survey indicated that they earn monthly salaries between $, and $,,  percent stated that they earn over $, per month.

The Structure of the Book As the discussion of our criteria for selecting groups and sites to study demonstrates, this volume, while focusing on communities with their own specificities, touches upon dynamics in Latin American migration that are evident beyond Florida, in the New South and throughout the United States. To draw the larger empirical and theoretical implications of our case studies, we have divided them into three parts, addressing the key clusters of question that have

INTRODUCTION

23

driven our research: transnationalism, collective mobilization, and lived religion. For each part, we have tried to include chapters about the three groups we studied, in order to facilitate comparisons and contrasts. In the conclusion, we will offer an assessment of what our findings at the local level mean for debates on immigration around these three overarching topics. NOTES

. See Anna Peterson, Manuel A. Vásquez, Philip Williams, eds., Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ); Edward L. Cleary and Timothy J. Steigenga, eds., Resurgent Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ); and Manuel A. Vásquez, Chad E. Seales, and Marie Friedmann Marquardt, “New Latino Destinations,” in Latinos/as in the United States: Changing the Face of America, ed. Havidán Rodríguez, Rogelio Sáenz, and Cecilia Menjívar, – (New York: Springer, ). . This estimate does not include the . million residents from Puerto Rico. . While we are acutely aware of the specific inaccuracies (particularly in the case of indigenous Mayan immigrants) and the socially constructed nature of the terms “Latino” and “Hispanic,” we utilize the terms interchangeably throughout this volume following their usage in the U.S. Census. For the  U.S. Census definition see http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_.htm. For a more complete discussion of the debate see Linda Martín Alcoff, “Latino vs. Hispanic: The Politics of Ethnic Names,” Philosophy and Social Criticism  (): –. . Roberto Suro, “Latino Growth in Metropolitan America: Changing Patterns, New Locations,” published report, Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., July . . Betsy Guzmán and Eileen Diaz McConnell, “The Hispanic Population: – Growth and Change,” Population Research and Policy Review  (): –. . Stanley K. Smith and June M. Nogle, “An Evaluation of Hispanic Population Estimates,” Social Science Quarterly , no.  (): –. . Pew Hispanic Center, “The New Latino South: The Context and Consequences of Rapid Population Growth,” published report, Washington, D.C., July , . . Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick, City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). . Stanley K. Smith, “Florida Population Growth: Past, Present and Future,” Bureau of Economic and Business Research, published report, University of Florida, June . . Net migration into the state accounted for . percent of the growth. Foreign immigrants now account for  percent of all persons moving to Florida. Contrary to popular belief, between  and  only . percent of immigrants to Florida were age sixty-five or older (Smith, “Florida Population Growth”). . See Jorge Durand and Douglas Massey, Clandestinos, Migración México-Estados Unidos en los Albores del Siglo XXI (Zacatecas, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas y Porrua, ); Victor Zúñiga and Rubén Hernández-León, eds., New Destinations: Mexican Immigration in the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, ); H. Smith and Owen Furuseth, Latinos in the New South: Transformation of Place (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2006). . Zúñiga and Hernández-León, New Destinations; William Kandel and Emilio Parrado, “Industrial Transformation and Hispanic Migration to the American South: The Case of the Poultry Industry,” in Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places: A Geography of Regional and

24

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Cultural Diversity, ed. Daniel D. Arreola, – (Austin: University of Texas Press, ). . Ann Millard and Jorge Chapa, Apple Pie and Enchiladas: Latino Newcomers in the Rural Midwest (Austin: University of Texas Press, ). . Mary Waters and Tomás Jiménez, “Assessing Immigrant Assimilation: New Empirical and Theoretical Challenges,” Annual Review of Sociology  (): . . Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” Atlantic Monthly  (July ): –. . Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, ); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives (Oxford: Blackwell, ). . Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Malden, MA: Blackwell, ). . Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,” Public Culture , no.  (): –; Luis Eduardo Guarnizo and Michael P. Smith, “The Locations of Transnationalism,” in Transnationalism from Below: Comparative Urban and Community Research, ed. M. P. Smith and Luis Guarnizo, –(New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers, ). . Roger Rouse, “Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism,” Diaspora  (spring ): –. . Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Migration, Postcolonial Predicaments, and the Deterritorialized Nation-State (Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach, ). . Ibid., . . Ibid. . Alejandro

Portes,

Eduardo

Guarnizo,

and

Patricia

Landolt,

“The

Study

of

Transationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field,” Ethnic and Racial Studies  (March ): –. . Nina Glick Schiller, “Transmigrants and Nation-States: Something Old and Something New in the U.S. Immigrant Experience,” in The Handbook of International Migration, ed. Charles Hirschmann, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind in (New York: The Russell Sage Foundation, ), . . Nina Glick Schiller, “Transnational Social Fields and Imperialism: Bringing a Theory to Transnational Studies,” Anthropological Theory , no.  (): . . Nina Glick Schiller and Georges Fouron, “Terrains of Blood and Nation: Haitian Transnational Social Fields,” Ethnic and Racial Studies  (): –. . Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . . Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller, “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society,” International Migration Review  ():–. . Manuel Vásquez and Marie Marquardt, Globalizing the Sacred: Religion across the Americas (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ). . Susanne H. Rudolph and James Piscatori, eds., Transnational Religion and Fading States (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, ). . Peggy Levitt, “Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging: The Institutional Character of Transnational Religious Life,” Sociology of Religion  (): . . Ibid., . . Ibid., –. . Eric Kramer, “Spectacle and the Staging of Power in Brazilian Neo-Pentecostalism,” Latin American Perspectives  (January ): –; Patricia Fortuny, “The Santa Cena of el Luz Del Mundo Church: A Case of Contemporary Transnationalism,” in Religion across Borders: Transnational Immigrant Networks, ed. Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, – (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, ).

INTRODUCTION

25

. Alejandro Portes, “The Debates and Significance of Immigrant Transnationalism,” Global Networks  (July ): –. . Levitt, Transnational Villagers. . José Itzigsohn, C. D. Cabral, E. H. Medina, and O. Vazquez, “Mapping Dominican Transnationalism: Narrow and Broad Transnational Practices,” Ethnic and Racial Studies  (): –. . Levitt, Transnational Villagers, .

Along the same lines, Thomas Faist argues that

transnational linkages may take at least three forms. First, there are “transnational kinship groups” built on one-on-one reciprocity, such as when immigrants send remittances to family members in their country of origin. Second, there are “transnational circuits” constructed around instrumental exchanges, as in the business transactions among migrant entrepreneurs. Finally, Faist refers to “transnational communities” that encompass shared meanings and beliefs expressed in the form of collective identity. Thomas Faist, “Transnationalization in International Migration: Implications for the Study of Citizenship and Culture,” Ethnic and Racial Studies , no.  (): –. . Portes, “The Debates and Significance,” . . Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt, “The Study of Transnationalism,” . . Faist, “Transnationalization.” . Cities and towns as diverse as Avon Park, Florida; Escondido, California; Farmers Branch, Texas; Hazleton, Pennsylvania; Riverside, New Jersey; and Valley Park, Missouri, have passed local ordinances that prohibit businesses from hiring undocumented immigrants or renting/leasing to them. At the state level, a number of states have passed legislation to prohibit undocumented immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses. In Georgia, the state legislature passed Immigration Law  in , which denies state benefits to undocumented workers, requires employers to withhold  percent of wages from workers who cannot prove their legal status, and authorizes state and local police to enforce federal immigration laws. . For an example of such an overview in the context of Latin American social movements, see Charles Hale, “Cultural Politics of Identity in Latin America,” Annual Review of Anthropology , no.  (): –. . Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization.” . Anna Peterson, Manuel Vásquez, and Philip Williams, “Christianity and Social Change in the Shadow of Globalization,” in Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas, ed. Anna L. Peterson, Manuel A. Vásquez, Philip J. Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), . . Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization,” –. . Keck and Sikkink refer to these examples of transnational activism as “transnational advocacy networks.” Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), . Despite Appadurai’s cautious optimism that transnational advocacy networks “might offset the most volatile effects of runaway capital,” he acknowledges that the social imagination of these movements is often disciplined by and controlled by states, markets, and other powerful global interests. Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization,” . . Roger Rouse, “Thinking through Transnationalism: Notes on the Cultural Politics of Class Relations in Contemporary United States,” Public Culture  (): –. . Ibid., . . Ibid., . . According to Manuel Castells, while the rise of societies crisscrossed by global networks encourages new forms of identity construction, the search for meaning is more

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likely to take the form of “defensive” identities, “trenches of resistance and survival on the basis of principles different from, or opposed to, those permeating the institutions of society.” Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, ), . . Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . . Alejandro Portes, Cristina Escobar, and Alexandria Walton Radford, “Immigrant Transnational Organizations and Development: A Comparative Study, International Migration Review  (spring ): . . Castells distinguishes between “defensive identities” and “project identities.” Project identity refers to political projects that seek to “build a new identity that redefines their position in society and, by so doing, seek the transformation of overall social structure.” Castells, Power in Movement, . . Rouse, “Thinking through Transnationalism,” . . Ibid. . Alberto Melucci, “A Strange Kind of Newness: What’s ‘New’ in New Social Movements,” in New Social Movements, ed. Enrique Laraña, Hank Johnston, and Joseph Gusfield (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ), . . Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . . According to Tarrow, connective structures “link leaders and followers, center and periphery, and different parts of a movement sector, permitting coordination and aggregation between movement organizations and allowing movements to persist even when formal organization is lacking.” Ibid. . Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . . Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies, –. . Cecilia Menjívar, Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America (Berkley: University of California Press, ), . . Alejandro Portes, “Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology  (): –. . Roger Waldinger, “The ‘Other Side’ of Embeddedness: A Case Study of the Interplay between Economy and Ethnicity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies  (): –. . Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick, City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . . Portes and Stepick discuss how upper-class Nicaraguan exiles who arrived in Miami during the s were able to tap into the resources of the Cuban “moral community” because of their common history of exile from a left-wing regime and their staunchly anti-communist political ideology. However, other immigrant groups, like Haitians, were excluded from membership in the moral community. . Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, ), . . Richard Wood, Faith in Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). . Michael Foley, “Religious Institutions as Agents for Civic Incorporation: A Preliminary Report on Research on Religion and New Immigrants,” . Paper presented at the th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, CA, August –September , . . Putnam, Bowling Alone; Mark R. Warren, J. Phillip Thompson, and Susan Saegert, “The Role of Social Capital in Combating Poverty,” in Social Capital and Poor Communities, ed. Saegert, Thompson, and Warren, – (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, ). . Ibid., . . Wood, Faith in Action, .

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. Foley, “Religious Institutions.” . Daniel Levine and David Stoll, “Bridging the Gap between Empowerment and Power in Latin America,” in Transnational Religion and Fading States, ed. Susanne Rudolph and James Piscatori, – (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, ). . Foley and Hoge found that whereas Protestant evangelical churches “rarely encouraged their members to exercise these skills outside the worship community,” Catholic parishes “promoted widespread participation among parishioners, volunteering outside the community, and civic activism.” Michael Foley and Dean Hoge, Religion and the New Immigrants: How Faith Communities Form Our Newest Citizens (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . . John

Booth

and

Patricia

Richards,

“Civil

Society,

Political

Capital,

and

Democratization in Central America,” Journal of Politics , no.  (): . . Patricia Fortuny and Philip Williams, “Religion and Social Capital among Mexican Immigrants in Southwest Florida,” Latino Studies , no.  (): –. . Booth and Richards, “Civil Society,” . . The literature on secularization is vast. For a sampling, see Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, ); José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); David Martin, General Theory of Secularization (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing, ); Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). . Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, ). . Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular. . Poblete and O’Dea argue that, particularly in the United States, Puerto Ricans encounter a complex and fast-paced society in tension with their rural worldview and values. This tension, added to the economic exclusion and racial discrimination they face, opens Puerto Rican immigrants to alienation and anomie, to a loss of sense of self and communal connection, ultimately leading them to explore other religious options or eventually turn toward secularization. Renato Poblete and Thomas O’Dea, “Anomie and the ‘Quest for Community’: The Formation of Sects among the Puerto Ricans of New York,” American Catholic Sociological Review  (spring ): –. . See the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Hispanic Center, Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, ). . The Pew survey also found that, compared to Catholic Latinos, “secular” Latinos tended to show the traditional signs of “assimilation”: English dominance or bilingualism ( percent), higher levels of formal education ( percent are high school graduates), and higher household incomes ( percent with incomes above $,). In other words, integration into modern U.S. society seems to correlate with a more secular outlook among Latinos. Pew Forum, Changing Faiths. . Pew Forum, Changing Faiths. . Stephen Warner, “Immigration and Religious Communities in the United States,” in Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration, ed. Stephen Warner and Judith Wittner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ), . . See R. Stephen Warner, “A Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology  (March ): –. For examples of the New Paradigm at work, see Rodney Stark

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and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); and Christian Smith et. al., American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). . Some secularization theorists have all but repudiated the secularization model. For a dramatic example, see Peter Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, ); Peter Berger, “Reflections on the Sociology of Religion Today,” Sociology of Religion  (winter ): –. . Stark and Finke, Acts of Faith; Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, –: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ). . Nancy Ammerman, Congregation and Community (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ); Mark Chaves, Congregations in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). . Stephen Warner and Judith Wittner, eds., Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ); Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, Religion and the New Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, ). . Mary Waters and Tomás Jiménez, “Assessing Immigrant Assimilation: New Empirical and Theoretical Challenges,” Annual Review of Sociology  (): –. . Pew Forum, Changing Faiths, . . For an attempt to emplace congregations within the larger local context, see Nancy Eiesland, A Particular Place: Urban Restructuring and Religious Ecology in a Southern Exurb (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ); and Omar McRoberts, Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). . In their recent study of religion and new immigrants in Washington, D.C., Foley and Hoge reject the term “congregation” in favor of “local worship communities.” They argue that the use of the term “congregation” implies a congregational template characteristic of American Protestant churches that “obscures important differences” between worship communities. Foley and Hoge, Religion and the New Immigrants, –. . Vásquez and Marquardt, Globalizing the Sacred. . Karen Leonard, Alex Stepick, Manuel Vásquez, and Jennifer Holdaway, Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America (New York: AltaMira, ). . Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in Lived Religion in America, ed. David Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . . Daniel Levine, ed., Religion and Political Conflict in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ). . Thus, Hall writes, “Where lived religion goes its own way is in breaking with the distinction between high and low that seems inevitably to recur in studies of popular religion. That is, [case studies operating under this approach] are not built around a structure of opposition. Nor do they displace the institutional or normative perspectives on practice, as historians of popular religion so commonly do.” David Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), ix. . Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . . Ibid., .

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. Ibid., . . Robert Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), . . For example, see Elizabeth Brusco, The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia (Austin: University of Texas Press, ). . See Russell Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, ); and Charles Ragin, Constructing Social Research (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, ). . With the exception of a handful of significant works, these two immigrant groups have not received detailed scholarly treatment. For the major studies of Guatemalan immigrants, see Leon Finke, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); Allan Burns, Maya in Exile: Guatemalans in Florida (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ); and Jacqueline María Hagan, Deciding to Be Legal: A Maya Community in Houston (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ). For studies on Brazilians, see Maxine Margolis, Little Brazil: An Ethnography of Brazilian Immigrants in New York City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ); Ana Cristina Braga Martes, Brasileiros nos Estados Unidos. Um estudo sobre imigrantes em Massachusetts (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, ); and Teresa Sales, Brasileiros Longe de Casa (São Paulo: Cortez, ). . See Burns, Maya in Exile, for the history of Mayan settlement in Florida. . Margolis, Little Brazil; and Martes, Brasileiros nos Estados Unidos.

PA RT O N E !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Transnational Lives Networks, Families, and Solidarities across Borders

2 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Beyond Homo Anomicus Interpersonal Networks, Space, and Religion among Brazilians in Broward County MANUEL A. VÁSQUEZ

Scholars of immigration, such as Maxine Margolis, Teresa Sales, and Ana Cristina Martes, have long documented the fact that Brazilians abroad consistently complain about the lack of community and collective solidarity among themselves. Margolis, for instance, found a pervasive “ideology of disunity” among Brazilians in New York. She writes: Brazilians often talk about the absence of an esprit de corps in their community and compare themselves unfavorably in this regard to New York’s other new immigrant groups. All the Brazilians present at a gathering in Queens insisted that they alone among ethnic groups in the city lack a sense of community. Lamented one, “We have no club, no school, no union, no support from other Brazilians.” “Everyone in New York has a community association except us,” said another. Over and over, I was told that there are no Brazilian ethnic, social, or professional associations, no Brazilian occupational specialties akin to those of Korean greengrocers and Indian newsstand dealers—only commercial enterprises, such as those on West th Street.

Margolis did the bulk of her fieldwork in the late s and early s, and much has changed since then, including the virtual disappearance of the business enclave known as Little Brazil and the rapid concentration of Brazilians in Queens neighborhoods, such as Astoria. However, more recent studies show that this concern with a lack of community life persists. In her study of Brazilian immigrants in Massachusetts, Martes states that one of her most unexpected findings was “the way in which Brazilians referred to each other. Throughout the interviews and participant observation, the complaints about the lack of solidarity, the hunger for [personal] gain, and the low community participation characterized a discursive field full of ambivalence, since the complaints also 33

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came with repeated strong expression of love for Brazil and for its people.” Given the deep internal divisions among Brazilians, Martes found that “churches are the institutions that offer the most support to Brazilians. Yet, the ways in which this support is organized institutionally lead to significant differentials.” The centrality of churches amid a weak communitarian base is confirmed by Margolis’s later work. Our research in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach also revealed a generalized critical attitude among Brazilians for the failure to organize and build a sense of community. The following statements by Brazilians in Broward County illustrate this self-critical attitude: We see other [immigrant] communities more organized, like Hispanics. They have a whole organization, unions . . . but here we are missing Brazilian [public] faces. I see many Hispanics leading [na frente] . . . but Brazilians helping each other? What they do more here is complain. If it were to get Brazilians together: “Let’s organize our community and such,” then people here would not respond. (Focus Group with Evangelical Church Fonte de Vida) First of all, a Brazilian when he comes from Brazil does not trust other Brazilians because they will trip you [passar a perna] and that is generalized. And another thing, a Brazilian only thinks about saving himself and the rest be dammed [que se dane]. That mentality continues. There are very few who help and those who would like to help end up being hurt [lesados]. (Focus Group with Baptist Church) Here everybody is very concerned [preocupado] with him/herself, with trying to make it, to gather some money, to build a patrimony there [in Brazil] or here, and then I believe that the concern for the other person does not exist much, as we have in Brazil. The guy is just worried about what is his/hers. Unfortunately, it is like that. (Catholic man)

Close to one-fifth of our survey respondents indicated that the single most important “community” need is group solidarity. This is all the more striking considering that the second most selected community need was legalization of immigrant status, chosen by . percent of respondents. Nevertheless, we also found strong indications that Brazilians do help each other. One Catholic man told us, for example, “We help a lot of people whom we don’t know, people whom we heard about. Here in the church especially. One gives messages: ‘Ah! So and so needs a house or a job, or suffered an accident, or maybe is having financial difficulties. And so, everybody helps everybody.” How, then, do we make sense of the contrasting perceptions of community life among Brazilian immigrants and the scholars who study them? The contrast might be partly the result of the notion of community itself, which is highly complex and contested, containing “objective” referents, such

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as the presence of visible voluntary associations and/or shared, bounded living and working spaces, as well as “subjective” components like the widespread feeling of group belonging and identity. Since “the word community itself is a Rorschach blot upon which myriad hopes and fears are projected,” the use of this concept to assess the nature and degree of sociability of a particular group is highly problematic. Moreover, in recent years, scholars of migration and globalization have challenged the functionalism and static nature of the notion of community: community is traditionally construed as a territorially bounded social organism with identifiable parts harmoniously integrated by a unified and shared culture. As anthropologist Roger Rouse puts it, in the modern social sciences, community has become “the abstract expression of an idealized nation-state.” This romanticized and abstract expression, in turn, does not correspond to the increasing interconnectivity and fluidity generated by globalization and transnationalism. Due to its problematic assumptions and uses, the concept of community is not very helpful to explore the disjunctive flows and processes that characterize globalization today. As we saw in chapter , some migration scholars, including Nina Glick Schiller and Peggy Levitt, have used “transnational social fields” as an alternative analytical tool to understand how individuals and groups manage multiple time-space scales. We saw how transnational social fields are generated out of the evolving intersection of a myriad of personal networks. This chapter follows the lead of these scholars, focusing on interpersonal networks as a way to understand sociability among Brazilians in Broward County, without falling prey to the functionalist weaknesses behind the concept of community, which has been the mainstay of research on Brazilian immigration. Network analysis has a long and distinguished trajectory in the social sciences, particularly in the sociology of migration. In the study of immigrant religions, the concept of networks is emerging as tool to enrich and critique work on territorially bounded congregations, which has been the dominant paradigm in the field. In this chapter, I do not use the concept of network in its more abstract, mathematical version, nor do I see networks in a functionalist manner, as wholes that automatically bring the social group together. Networks are “open” and “highly dynamic” structures of relationality. They mark relatively stable but always tensile differentials of power, of inclusion and exclusion, of cooperation and conflict, of boundary-crossing and boundary-making. As sociopolitically, culturally, and ecologically embedded relational processes, networks are not only constraining but enabling. Thus, as Barry Wellman and S. D. Berkowitz put it, network analysis allows us to study “processes in terms of patterned interrelationships rather than on the basis of individual essences.” Finally, networks are negotiated “phenomenological realities.” In other words, meaning and intentionality are not just commodities that circulate alongside social and symbolic capital but are constitutive of the networks themselves.

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Using network analysis and drawing from surveys, focus groups and interviews, I argue that, despite the lack of civic organizations, Brazilians in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach sustain a rich sociability. In chapter , José Claúdio Souza Alves describes the more institutionalized expressions of this sociability: the interacting local, national, and transnational networks anchored on church and business nodes. Here, I will focus on infrastructural sociability, on the wealth of mostly informal interpersonal networks that keep Brazilians in Broward County connected to each other in everyday life. Connections at the infra-level are not restricted to locality. They stretch transnationally, linking households, families, and villages in the society of settlement and origin. In fact, infra-level networks among Brazilians in Broward County constitute an incipient transnational social field. Given the richness of infrastructural sociability, the lack of visible markers of community life has to do, at least in the case of Brazilians in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach, with the paucity of bridging spaces and ties between the more established institutional networks, described by Souza Alves in chapter , and interpersonal networks. In other words, the ideology of disunity, while certainly present in ways that reproduce cultural and social hierarchies brought from Brazil and thus generate new internal divisions, is strongly conditioned by the new destination’s structural and spatiotemporal dynamics that make it difficult to translate interpersonal relations into collective mobilization. Before proceeding, a word of caution is in order here. Since the survey was conducted using the snowball technique, following networks of acquaintances, the results may have produced a significant bias in the number of friends reported, showing higher levels of interconnection among Brazilians. This bias notwithstanding, the fact that there are many vital networks to follow is in itself an important sign that there is a sociability among Brazilians that has hitherto been below scholars’ radars.

Personal Networks: Sociability at the Crevices Despite the lack of voluntary associations and the widespread discourse of mistrust and contempt for compatriots, Brazilians in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach sustain a relatively strong sociability, built on relations not just with passing acquaintances but also with (elective) best friends and affinitive relations (family). When asked, “How many good friends do you have in this city?” more than half of the respondents ( percent) indicated that they had at least three close friends in the city and the average number of close friends was slightly more than five. In contrast, recent studies have found that over  percent of Americans have no more than two close friends. Brazilians are, then, not particularly isolated. Further,  percent of all respondents stated that they did not have any friends who were not from Brazil. In other words, the Brazilians surveyed build

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the majority of their strong friendships with compatriots. Moreover, . percent of respondents affirmed that they knew none of these friends before coming to the United States. This shows the preponderance of new intra-national ties forged during the immigrant experience. Household data in the survey shed further light on the personal networks among Brazilians in Broward. In our sample, Brazilians live in households with an average of two and a half rooms. The average number of Brazilians per household was .. That average can be compared with the mean of those living in the same household from the respondent’s hometown: ., and with the number of relatives living in the same household: .. In other words, in terms of housing arrangements and the articulation of private space, which we will argue later is central to Brazilians in Broward County, those surveyed strongly tend to live with individuals from the same village or with relatives. This might be an indirect indication of the strength of local-level and family networks. What are we to make of this data in light of the generalized impression that Brazilians lack a strong sense of community? In a study of East York, a fairly homogeneous working-class and lower-middle-class residential area in Toronto, Canada, Barry Wellman, Peter Carrington, and Alan Hall initially expected to see visible, almost palpable communities: neighbors chatting on front porches, friends relaxing on street corners, cousins gathering for Sunday dinners, and storekeepers retailing local gossip. But wherever we looked, we found few signs of active neighborhood life. We eventually realized that we were only seeing part of the picture. We had only been looking for the obvious physical signs of local community—on front porches and street corners—without noticing the more subtle reality of community ties. Although the streets of East York were usually empty, the residents were heavily involved in community networks. They had persons with whom they could visit, commune, share information, and exchange help. Community, like love, is where you find it. East Yorkers were finding it in ties, not in public places.

To get to the nuances of community life that they missed initially, Wellman, Carrington, and Hall posited the notion of “personal communities.” They write: “We look for the social essence of community in neither locality nor solidarity, but in the ways in which networks of informal relations fit persons and households into social structures. Our approach focuses attention on the characteristics of ‘community ties’—informal links of companionship and aid between individuals—and on the patterns formed by these links.” Could the idea of personal communities explain what we found among Brazilians in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach? Are Brazilians engaged in smallscale yet intensive community-building ties that observers like Margolis and Martes may have missed because they are focused primarily on visible and formal

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associational manifestations? A focus on interpersonal networks rather than on an abstract concept of community does indeed reveal interesting and hitherto unseen dynamics among Brazilians in Broward County. Nevertheless, Wellman, Carrington, and Hall’s approach is also flawed. Working under a functionalist, quasi-Durkhemian framework, they assume that interpersonal ties, because they are more intimate (like love), are necessarily cooperative and that, as a result, they automatically build solidarity and community. As Cecilia Menjívar rightly argues, there has been a general tendency in immigration scholarship to concentrate “on depicting a one-dimensional view of immigrant informal networks that focuses exclusively on their positive aspects. Largely absent from portrayals of immigrant social networks is the potential for tension or even dissolution in these ties, which reinforces images of immigrant social ties as excessively cohesive and ‘organic.’ ” According to Menjívar, “the same networks that are supportive at one point can be riddled with conflict at others,” and some of the most exploitative relations occur among close friend or even relatives. Therefore, the fact that Brazilians in our survey sample are heavily interpersonally linked should not necessarily lead us to conclude that there is a dormant or invisible community in the making. Nevertheless, we should be careful not to “pathologize” the Brazilian immigrant as uniquely anti-communitarian. Internal divisions and relations of exploitation among Brazilians bear strong similarities with Latino groups, such as Salvadorans, Colombians, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans, despite perceptions among Brazilians that Hispanics are different. In chapter , our colleagues working in Immokalee have also found deep inequalities and severe internal exploitation among Mexicans on the basis of time of arrival and legal status. Moreover, similar patterns of co-ethnic or co-national exploitation have been documented among other non-Latino immigrants. Thus, we should not replace “the romantic, almost idyllic vision of immigrants and their communities” with another type of essentialism: the Brazilian immigrant as Homo anomicus. Rather we need to “downplay the assumption of altruism and universal consensus within . . . immigrant institutions in favor of an approach that emphasizes their contingent, shifting nature.” In our case, the question is not whether the Brazilian immigrant is overly self-interested and elitist, but under which constellation of cultural, socio-structural, and ecological conditions interpersonal and institutional ties fail to lead to collective action, generate a sense of solidarity, or become exploitative. We will address this question in the next section and conclusion. Now, I would like to touch briefly on the transnational dimension of the interpersonal ties we found.

From the Personal to the Transnational Like the notion of community, the concept of transnationalism is polyvocal and contested. According to the classic definition in Linda Basch, Nina Glick

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Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc’s Nations Unbound, transnationalism denotes “the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. We call these processes transnationalism to emphasize that many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders.” Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc call those immigrants engaged in multiple social relations spanning national borders “transmigrants.” They argue that “transmigrants take actions, make decisions, and develop subjectivities and identities embedded in networks of relationships that connect them simultaneously to two or more nation-states.” Chapter  offers a more systematic treatment of debates around the concept of transnationalism. For my intents and purposes here, it suffices to say that I agree with Alejandro Portes’s cautionary claim that “not all immigrants are ‘transmigrants’ and claims to the contrary needlessly weaken the validity of empirical findings on the topic. It is more useful to conceptualize transnationalism as one form of economic, political, and cultural adaptation that co-exists with other, more traditional forms.” Yet, even with this caveat, we find that the concept of transnationalism is very helpful in highlighting the worldviews and practices of a growing number of immigrants who are bifocal, that is, who keep their feet in their homelands and host societies. Particularly valuable are the concepts of transnational social field, as “an unbounded terrain of interlocking egocentric networks,” and of “social remittances,” which Peggy Levitt defines as “the ideas, behaviors, and social capital that flow from receiving to sending communities. They are the tools with which ordinary individuals create global culture at the local context.” Even limiting our definition of transnationalism to cross-national social fields constituted by clusters of interpersonal networks and by flows of remittances, social and otherwise, Brazilians in Broward are significantly engaged in transnational activities. Close to half of those surveyed (. percent) have not traveled to Brazil since they came to the United States, while only . percent stated that they have visited their home country more than ten times since arriving in the United States. These numbers seem to indicate that, in contrast to what might be expected of wealthy Brazilians in Miami, only a small, relatively cosmopolitan elite of Brazilians in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach has the facility to move across national borders. Transnationalism, however, is not just about physical movement from country of origin to that of settlement. Indeed, the great majority of the Brazilian population in Broward maintains close connections with Brazil through other means. Seventy-one percent of our respondents phone Brazil at least once a week, taking advantage of inexpensive calling cards widely available in various Brazilian commercial establishments. Further,  percent stated that they send e-mails to Brazil at least once a week. Here, Brazilians in Pompano and Deerfield appear to evince a digital gap similar

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to that in mainstream United States. More significantly,  percent of our respondents send remittances at least once a month. Fifty-seven percent sent between $ and $ per month. Slightly more than  percent send their remittances through Brazilian agencies, while  percent of those remittances go to families back home, once again indicating that Brazilians draw from their own networks to circulate goods and capital from household to household, across national borders. Other important indexes of simultaneous embeddedness in our sample include the following: . percent receive news about Brazil from Brazilian friends frequently or very frequently; .percent read Brazilian newspapers frequently or very frequently; . percent read news about Brazil from the Internet frequently or very frequently; . percent watch Brazilian TV frequently or very frequently; . percent receive news about Brazil from their churches; and . percent attend events organized by people coming from Brazil specifically for the event The following exchange during an in-depth interview with an evangelical pastor gives a qualitative flavor to these indexes: INT:

Do you always stay in touch with Brazil?

RES:

Yes, at the end of the week . . . I sometimes, when there is a need, but there is always a need, so I call. . . . I have family in Brazil, my cousins, other relatives.

INT:

Brothers and Sisters?

RES:

Yes, recently I had to get in touch for a bad reason. I lost a nephew, so, one of the advantages is that I could help, help my nephew’s family.

INT:

Did you send financial aid?

RES:

I sent financial aid to take care of the wake and to pay all related things.

INT:

Do you send financial aid to your family?

RES:

Yes, I usually do, because we know how things are in Brazil . . .

INT:

And do you stay in touch through the phone?

RES:

Yes.

INT:

And the Internet?

RES:

Internet is more to stay in touch with my friends. I send them faxes, e-mail . . .

INT:

E-mail? You know a bit about that world? It is cheaper . . .

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RES:

Yes, it is and it is very fast. You send a message and it is there right away.

INT:

Telephone calls are more expensive . . .

RES:

Yes, but here phone calls are also cheap. With $ you can talk two hours with folks in Brazil. Thus, the respondents in our sample are actively involved with their coun-

try of origin, preferring ego-centric networks of friends to keep in touch. In the forging of a transnational social field at the everyday level, institutions such as churches do not seem to play the most significant roles. Also, public events organized to host visiting Brazilians do not appear to be as central in the transnational flows. These observations point once again to the gap between a rich sociability at the level of everyday life and the existence of visible organizational forms. The question is, What sociocultural and ecological conditions have conditioned this gap?

Space and the Limits to Associational Life In her study of social relations in African American enclaves, Patricia Fernandez-Kelly found that the relative viability and effectiveness of networks are affected by the socioeconomical and spatiotemporal contexts in which they are embedded. According to her, “the form and effect of cultural and social capital are defined [among other things] by physical vectors, such as the characteristics of urban space.” She continues: “Because people derive their knowledge from the physical spaces where they live, they also anticipate that which is probable in their nearby environment, and they recognize as reality that which is defined as such by members of their interpersonal network occupying proximate spheres of intimacy. For that reason, social and cultural capital are toponomical, that is dependent on physical and social location.” Fernandez-Kelly’s insight is, of course, not entirely new. As Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin note, it builds on the Chicago school’s pioneering work, which construed all social facts as “ecologically embedded within specific contexts of time and space— that is to say, within particular interactional fields composed of concrete, historically specific ‘natural areas’ and ‘natural histories.’ ” Space and time matter greatly for Brazilians in Broward County. They are generally not concentrated in particular neighborhoods or even in a territorially bounded locality. Rather, they are spread out over an approximately fortymile-long corridor that extends from Boca Raton to Hollywood. This is essentially a sprawling exurban cartography built around the logic of the car, with long and busy thoroughfares linking scattered large shopping malls and gated communities. Such a landscape stands in sharp contrast to hometown geographies in Brazil, which are usually built around heavily populated neighborhoods that mix residences, stores, restaurants, and public space. In fact, these neighborhoods are

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normally anchored around public spaces like plazas, parks, and beaches. In South Florida, even beaches which could serve as shared spaces are deeply segregated, many of them in private hands. Broward County’s wide avenues more often than not have no sidewalks, forcing people to drive for even short distances. Moreover, public transportation is generally inadequate and inconvenient, compelling most Brazilians to own cars, despite the difficulty of obtaining and renewing driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. The landscape in Broward is also radically different from that faced by other Brazilians in the United States. For example, in Newark, New Jersey, Brazilians are heavily concentrated in Ironbound, an area previously mapped out by Portuguese immigrants. Newark is a traditional industrial city divided into organic neighborhoods of row houses with a well-defined town center. This town center is full of businesses, restaurants, and churches owned by Brazilians. It is not surprising, thus, to hear Portuguese in the streets, as people gather around to chat about the neighborhood or Brazil. In New York City, although the Brazilian population is fairly dispersed, there is at least access to an extensive system of public transportation that allows people to keep in touch with each other. Also, there are well-established ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods, like Astoria and Long Island City in Queens, where there are concentrated pockets of Brazilians serving as anchors for newcomers. Finally, in the Boston area, Brazilians have concentrated in relatively small towns at the periphery of the city, such as Somerville and Framingham, where they have gradually built dense networks around not only churches and businesses but also civic and cultural organizations. Here we have to keep in mind that migration to the Boston area is at least a decade older than that to the Broward County region. As we know, social networks are strongly affected by the length of residency. Thus, in comparison to other destinations, Broward’s topography makes it particularly difficult for Brazilians to build connectivity across distances and public spaces, contributing to the lack of traditional markers of community life. As one of our informants put it: The way of life of Brazilians up there [in Boston and New York] is very different to what we have here in Florida. And one of the reasons is the ease which one has up there to make connections, your own network, to find your people and easy work. Today it is a little more difficult because jobs are becoming scarce, but it is easier there for someone coming from Brazil with a go-get it mentality [mentalidade de fazer o pe de meia e ir embora]. The north is much more attractive than Florida. And another thing is the means of transportation in Boston or Massachusetts. I worked in Boston for almost four years without needing a car because I lived close to a train station. I walked to the station and caught the bus that took me to the airport where I worked. So, in about five minutes I was

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at the airport. In Boston, you can go any place by train or bus, and here if you don’t have a car, you go nowhere.

Social interaction is also affected by work schedules. Survey respondents told us that they work an average of . hours per week. However,  percent of our respondents indicated that they work more than  hours per week, and  percent work more than  hours. With Brazilians often working multiple jobs six days a week, the only opportunity to visit public spaces where they can relax and interact affectively with other compatriots comes during lunch or on Saturdays and Sundays. In fact, close to  percent of our respondents stated that the main places where they go to “have fun” are private establishments like bars, restaurants, discos, and small shopping malls, most of which are owned by Brazilians. In other words, in comparison to interpersonal networks, reciprocal exchanges in Brazilian public spaces, including churches, tend to be of low frequency and duration, even though these spaces are built in the immigrant’s life world. The low frequency and duration of the exchanges, in turn, may explain why Brazilians seek spaces highly charged with affective energy, such as Pentecostal and charismatic churches. In these churches, exchanges might be restricted to weekends, but they are charged with great emotional intensity, an intensity that may serve as a break from or a catharsis for the routine and pressures of everyday life.

Religion and the Management of Lived Spaces Brazilians try to cope with Broward’s de-centered geography, the lack of established immigrant networks, their busy schedules, and the newness of their immigration through a variety of ways. I have already hinted at one: they draw from their religious resources to come together and carve out meaningful lived spaces and cogent individual and collective identities. More specifically, for a recently arrived population in an alien, even hostile environment, churches and, more generally, congregations of various types serve as social spaces for recreation and emotional support. Two of our informants articulate this function well: Here in our center, we eat together, we play [a gente brinca], socialize [confraterniza], and get involved with other Brazilians. It is where I can practice [the charity and philosophy of life] what I’m learning. (Spiritist man, ) The Brazilian church has been a channel; it is as if through it people enjoy [sentir mais prazer] being here more. Because before [coming to church] it was as if one was isolated, as if one was in a foreign land. Now, no, everybody feels at ease [mais à vontade]. And then one begins to feel good. (Catholic woman, )

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Churches also provide a space for the collective affirmation of national identity, making it possible for Brazilians to relate to the sacred through their mother tongue and autochthonous rituals. As a Brazilian Catholic bishop in Newark, New Jersey, told us, “There are things that can only be done in one’s mother tongue, for example praying. Brazilians have the right to be able to pray in Portuguese.” More generally, religion provides interpretive frameworks in the form of narratives, tropes, or symbols, to make sense of the process of migration and build the self in close relation with the power of the sacred. I did not have anyone to rely on: my childhood friends, my family, or the certainty [segurança] of being in my own country. Well, I thought, now I can only rely on God. I have to hold on to Him to be able to keep going. And so once I saw myself alone in an ocean, shipwrecked, and He was my only life raft. (Catholic man, ) Logically, religion helps. This is particularly true when people participate in Spiritism. . . . People understand ideas, achieve a high morality and become more balanced, more motivated. One then contributes not just for the other [o próximo] through charity but even in one’s own professional work. (Spiritist man, )

These two quotes show the different ways in which Brazilians draw from their religious traditions to understand their immigration experiences. The Catholic man uses metaphors common to charismatics, who place a strong emphasis on the emotive aspects of religion. He uses tropes that portray the migration process as a tempest and stress the importance of an intense personal relationship with God. Amidst all the chaos, human agency is frail; only God is powerful, stable, and reliable enough. In contrast, the Spiritist man conceives of the migration process as a stage in the process of individual intellectual and moral development, a process that gives him the chance to be charitable to others and thus to benefit from the positive karma of good works. Very much in sync with Spiritism’s emphasis on a rational approach to the world, our informant knows that, with the right attitude, he can control his fate. Taken together, these testimonies demonstrate that networks and the flows that accompany them are phenomenological realities, that they are closely intertwined with what historian Amy DeRogatis calls “maps of piety” and moral behavior, which chart meaning, volition, emotion, and practice onto the socioecological spaces. If “every story is a travel story—a spatial practice,” as Michel de Certeau claims, then, religion, with its compelling tales of spiritual and moral quest—narratives of salvation, redemption, conversion, pilgrimage, healing, and fate—is a particularly crucial repository of resources for immigrants to create and manage lived spaces. Further, the testimonies resonate with Martes’s findings among Brazilians in south Boston. There she found that churches are a “safe space of sociability”

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(espaço seguro de sociabilidade). According to Martes, “the main motivation for Brazilians to attend churches of any [denomination] is that they believe that they can find in them a space characterized by solidarity, trust, and mutual help. Put in other words, Brazilian immigrants seek churches in Massachusetts primarily because they want to socialize.” She elaborates, “The welcoming environment of churches stands in contrast to the situation experience ‘out there,’ which is perceived as competitive and with low solidarity and community spirit.” In Broward County’s sprawling and hostile environment, the role of churches as safe spaces of sociability is even more crucial. This fact may help explain the built religious geography of the area. Brazilian congregations are distributed as “pearls in a string,” as nodes strung along the main thoroughfares, such as Federal Highway, Atlantic Boulevard, and Sample Road, where people can access them with relative ease and where they mark a sharp (spiritual if not architectural) break with the undifferentiated exurban ecology. However, we should be careful not to romanticize the role of churches, for they also respond in contradictory ways to the spatiotemporal context. Particularly in the case of some evangelical Protestant churches, the strategy to deal with demographic dispersion and busy work schedules is, paradoxically, to raise admission and affiliation standards sharply, demanding more commitment, sacrifice, and loyalty from practitioners in exchange for a more affectively charged and doctrinally certain social experience. Such a strategy raises the issue of internal “social control” and “a polarization between solidarity (within) and competition (without),” which is not necessarily conducive to the formation of community across religious affiliation. Furthermore, as Souza Alves’s discussion of the intersection of business and religious networks shows in chapter , as part of the immigrant mode of production, churches are also susceptible to the commodification of social relations and economic exploitation. Pastors may minister to their storefront congregations on Saturday night, while during the week they may oversee some of the faithful in the roofing companies or car dealerships they own. Often this blurring of the sacred-profane distinction is accompanied by a gospel of health and wealth that finds no contradiction between faith and success in attaining a piece of the American dream. In a particularly striking example of this ethos, we observed a pastor preach to the congregation about his green card, his new car in the parking lot, and his big beautiful house, all of which he affirmed he achieved through his faith and hard work. He asked the congregation to follow his example and contribute to his church to gain all of God’s blessing. Such a case may be extreme. However, it points to the need not to separate automatically business and religious networks. Religious networks often act not only to provide moral sanction to certain types of economic activities, as Max Weber would argue, but also to serve as business relays themselves. Churches and congregations are, however, not the only or even the main strategy that Brazilians use to negotiate their reality in Broward County. Despite

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the significant public role of churches, our informants’ primary response to the spatiotemporal setting which they face is to retreat to the private space of the home. Eighty-four percent of the respondents to our survey indicated that the place in which they feel most comfortable in the city is their homes. Churches came a distant second with only  percent of the respondents selecting them as the place in which they feel most comfortable (the third option was a generic “public places” category with only  percent). The percentages are almost the same for men and women. Brazilians revealed some of the reasons for preferring their homes in the focus groups: Life here is very tumultuous. There are times when one has to do a thousand things during the day and [then] one returns home, takes off one’s shoes, takes a bath, and goes to heaven [esta no ceu]. For me my home is that; it is a place of peace, where the running ceases. Despite the fact that with all the household chores, one does not stop, I know I’m in my place and I disconnect myself. I try to disconnect myself from the world because it is my time to rest. My home is the only place where I can sleep and I love to sleep. (Catholic woman, ) First, I like to stay at home more because I believe that here people stay out too much, too many hours outside of home. Everyone works and people spend too little time with the family. Then, my second place is the church, because it is home-church and church-home. And this ends up stressing people a bit because we also need to go to other environments [ambientes], to go to a park, or the beach, to go to a place where you have different people, because we stay a lot at home. On Sunday we go to church and that would be the day we would also stay at home, because on the other days, we work the whole day, from Monday to Saturday. My husband works until Saturday also and then usually we go to church on Sunday and then return home. (Catholic woman, ) The thing about home, that is a thing about fear. It is more comfortable to be in one’s own ghetto, where you know all things, every reality. There you have control over the situation, but if you go out, you are going into the unknown, right? Just imagine those who don’t have any knowledge, those who are undocumented, those who don’t have any future [perspectiva] and fear anything that may happen to them; for them the move is to enclose themselves [se fechar] and to exaggerate what you hear. Like once in a while we hear [immigration] is having a dragnet [uma batida] there in Pompano. (Protestant woman, )

In the hostile exurban ecology of Broward County, affective life among Brazilian immigrants is strongly concentrated in the proximate sphere of intimacy. Against the centripetal forces they confront, Brazilians counterpose the most powerful trope of intimacy they can draw from their cultural tool kit: the

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idea of home (o lar). Some of our informants build stable spaces of safety, intimacy, and meaning by mapping the homeland into their homes in Florida. A member of a Brazilian Baptist church told us in no uncertain terms: “Here inside my house is a piece of Brazil. When you come in you see the Brazilian flag.” Others effectively fuse domestic and religious spaces into one, turning the home into a sacred space against the dangerous and profane outside world. They also elevate and extend the meaning of family to include the tight interpersonal networks they have built in South Florida. As a Brazilian evangelical Protestant stated in a focus group, “Those who don’t have families here have the church, which is our family. Our friends here are our relatives here. They are the ones on whom we can rely.” This emotive extension of the domestic space and family relations into the church is also evident among Catholics. Angela, a member of Nossa Senhora Aparecida Mission, told us, “Church is like my mother’s house, a safe port, a place where you go to get support [onde você vai para se apoiar].” To the extent that churches function effectively, then, it may be as extensions of the relations and experiences anchored at home. In one of the classics of Brazilian anthropology, O que faz o Brasil, Brasil, Roberto DaMatta writes about the tension between home and street (a casa e a rua). According to him, “there is a clear division between two fundamental spaces in Brazilian social life.” On the one hand, there is the street, a “place of work, movement, surprise, and temptation,” an often unforgiving space of “struggle [luta]” characterized by the constant flux of “undifferentiated and unknown individuals.” On the other hand, there is home, the realm of “peace and tranquility.” “At home we are members of a family and of a self-contained group with clearly defined borders and limits.” DaMatta takes an essentialist view of Brazilian culture, seeing it as a self-contained totality that can be decoded once and for all and then compared and contrasted with the cultures of the United States or India. Nevertheless, we do not have to subscribe to this cultural holism or to his methodological nationalism to recognize that he has identified an enduring organizing trope for Brazilians. Confronting the harsh reality of Broward County, Brazilians deploy the duality of home and street as a key interpretive framework. This hermeneutic device allows them to carve spaces of meaning and self-centering in response to the profound dispersion and dislocation they encounter in South Florida. Faced with invisibility and marginality in Broward, Brazilians sacralize home. Angela, a Catholic, describes how she and her family looked for a house when they were settling down in Broward. She prayed to God to help her find the right place. When they finally found and bought the house, a miracle took place: Before going in we prayed a Holy Father and Hail Mary, asking Mary to bless and protect us. And you know that when I went in the house, it was completely empty but there were two statues of Mary and a cross which

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had the following message: “I and my household always serve the Lord.” I didn’t ask Him specifically to give me something like, “I chose this house for you.” “You came because I need you here; you came to serve me.” Today one [statue] of Our Lady is in the same place, in the bathroom that the children use, and the cross is in the garage with the other statue, where my husband works, in the same spot where they were. Didn’t I ask for a sign [uma prova]?

DaMatta has argued that for Brazilians home “is not just a physical space, but a moral one: a sphere where we fulfill ourselves as human beings with a physical body but also with a moral and social dimension. At home we are unique and irreplaceable [insubstituíveis].” As Angela’s case shows, in diaspora, this physical-moral space becomes super-charged with religious symbolism, nostalgia, memory, longing for recognition, and lost intimacy. The collective energy behind the super-charged notion of home then spills into churches, domesticating them as it were, transforming them into a distended and protective domestic space across a hostile landscape. Still, as it is the case with the social role of churches and with the notion of communities, we need to be careful not to adopt an idealized vision of home. Brazilians themselves know that their domestic life in Broward stands in tension with their “real” and imagined homes in Brazil. For example, very often Brazilians in Broward County are forced to live in crowded apartments, where no one knows each other and everybody works all the time. As in the case of Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants discussed in chapter , in situations like these, the “home” in Florida becomes a space of alienation and mistrust, the antithesis of the remembered home in Brazil. According to an informant: “Many immigrants live on their own and often share an apartment with other Brazilians. Sometimes, five or six live in a two-bedroom apartment, all adults who are here just to work, and then they become totally alienated.” Yet another told us: “In Brazil my home space was literally different from the one here, because there I had my family. . . . Here I felt very strange when I fell into a house in which everyone was different. In Brazil, I loved to be with my family on those days I stayed home, since we are very close to each other. So, it felt weird here.” Further, the construction of home in the country of origin, as well as in the country of settlement, is gender specific. Brazilian women feel particularly ambivalent about the multiple homes they imagine and inhabit. Lara, a Spiritist who came to the United States in , has images of Brazil, and particularly of her city in Minas Gerais, as “violent and disorganized.” She also has negative memories of domestic life in Brazil. I saw that my husband thought that he had the right to do everything he wanted and I didn’t have that right. I had to stay at home, being pretty, taking care of the children. I worked the entire week. I helped with

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household expenses and at the end of the week I wasn’t part of his plans, to be able to go out and have fun with the children. So, there was discrimination and he started to go out only with his friends to drink, to parties, plus he began to plan trips alone. So, I experienced it firsthand [o senti na pele]. Only he had the rights and the responsibilities were mine.

In contrast, having become a U.S. citizen, she feels “much freer” in Florida, since “a woman of any age can take her car and go visit her friends, have breakfast or lunch together. She can go play golf, or tennis, or cards. Women have activities, so the lifestyle here is very different from Brazil.” Besides, in Florida she feels safe: “I don’t have to worry about my purse. How many times I forgot my wallet inside my car, left there overnight, and the next morning it was still there. I never had a problem with violence. It is true that it exists, but I never was a victim.” Still, she “dreams” to be able one day to spend half a year in Brazil and the other half in the United States. Home, therefore, is a conflictive space. However, even with this caveat, the point remains that for Brazilians in South Florida home is a powerful organizing trope, charged with familiarity and emotion. Brazilians in Broward County pull back into proximate spaces of intimacy and build networks outwards, connecting families and households to their places of origin, to relatives and friends left behind, and only tentatively to local networks like churches, which resonate with the affective charge that is part and parcel of their ideals of home. This defensive modus operandi is a creative attempt to make “virtue out of necessity,” to invent within limits, as Pierre Bourdieu puts it. However, homemaking may also have the unintended consequence of widening the gap between rich inter-personal networks and more formal networks like those built around business and labor.

Conclusion: Beyond Homo Anomicus In this chapter, I drew from fieldwork among Brazilians in Broward County to offer a new angle in the ongoing debate of whether Brazilians do and can form collective identity and community. I identified some of the same structural constraints uncovered by Margolis in her pioneering work on Brazilians in New York City: namely, the lack of distinctive physical areas inhabited by Brazilians, the scarcity of economic capital to form a large business class, and the busy work schedules that allow the flow of remittances back to Brazil but discourage local involvement beyond the private sphere. However, through the use of the analytical tool of networks, I tried to avoid some of the pitfalls of the concept of community as it has been applied to the Brazilian immigrant experience in the United States. Although “community” is an emic term, one that is used by the migrants themselves to express their frustrations and longings, it obscures

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the complexity and diversity of the forms of sociability sustained by Brazilian immigrants in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach. Precisely because it is emic, the category of community carries a whole set of unreflected normative assumptions of what a real community should be: community as characterized teleologically, as a set of visible goals that if not present indicate a social pathology that is almost impossible to remedy. The focus on networks, in contrast, tries to meet immigrants where they are, understanding sociability as processual, non-teleological, and contextual (at times expressing simultaneously cooperation and conflict). The study of networks allows us to see interaction and everyday practice in their own right, not subsumed under the functionalism and methodological holism that the notions of community and collective identity entail. In other words, although many times social interaction and collective identity go hand in hand, they are not automatically synonymous, such that the lack of visible markers of communal life necessarily implies that there is no social intercourse. To paraphrase Wellman, Carrington, and Hall, social connectivity, like love, is where you find it, warts and all. The one-sided attention to community or lack thereof has often been accompanied by culturalist explanations of the perceived lack of community cohesion among Brazilians. Margolis, for example, highlights a pervasive ideology of disunity among Brazilians, as well as the denial by Brazilians of their immigrant status and their class-based or region-based contempt for each other, among her key explanatory variables. To deny that these ideological patterns are significant would be plainly wrong, for we found some of the same prejudicial attitudes among many Brazilians in Broward County. However, without a rigorous contextualization, culturalist explanations run the risk of essentializing Brazilian immigrants. At their best, explanations that focus on the contradictory cultural patterns that Brazilians bring to their societies of settlement serve to demythologize overly romanticized understandings of the immigrant identities and experiences. At worst, these kinds of culturalist explanations end up creating another kind of stereotype: that among immigrants, particularly vis-à-vis Latinos, Brazilians are uniquely Homo anomicus. Because it resonates with some of the experiences of the immigrants themselves, this stereotype then becomes part of their discursive universe. In this sense, scholars of Brazilian migration and Brazilian immigrants have engaged in an exercise of self-fulfilling prophecy. They are mutually implicated in the creation of a certain view of the Brazilians in diaspora, which, while containing some elements of truth, has become a conceptual and political straightjacket. By focusing on networks, we can break this straightjacket and gain a fine-grained understanding of the structural, ecological, and relational contexts in which ideologies of exclusion and hierarchical order operate. To the extent that we can generalize from a small snowball survey and in-depth qualitative research, the problem of solidarity among Brazilians in

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Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach is primarily a case of social network truncation generated by the toponomical constraints of a new destination. Borrowing from Robert Putnam’s recent research on the impact of immigration on social solidarity, the failure to produce bridging civic institutions may have to do with the newness of Brazilian migration to Broward County. According to Putnam, in the short term, immigration and cultural diversity tend to produce social fragmentation, as all groups involved “hunker down” and form enclaves. Only through long-term cross-cutting interactions in common public spaces can a more “capacious we” that encompasses both immigrants and natives emerge. For Brazilians in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach, as for the other groups we have studied, the long-term process of integration will very likely be affected by the increasing anti-immigrant climate at the national and local levels, which is compelling immigrants to retreat to their protective private spaces of livelihood and to rely more than ever on their personal networks. If the lack of a tangible sense of community among Brazilians in Pompano and Deerfield is powerfully shaped by structural factors, which are mediated by ideational elements, the question then is how to resolve the problem. How can we encourage collective solidarity and mobilization among Brazilian immigrants? I have tried to show that religious resources play a significant role for new immigrants in nontraditional contexts of settlement. Particularly in the climate of resurgent nativism following September , , religion may be crucial for recently arrived immigrants to carve out meaningful lived spaces and identities in the crevices of a society that is increasingly criminalizing them, representing them as “illegal aliens” and “lawbreakers.” Religion might be helping immigrants negotiate the tension between visibility and invisibility, making them visible to each other in protective interpersonal spaces at a time when their survival and well-being is more and more predicated on their invisibility to the larger society. Whether the protective affective spaces of religion will remain inward-looking or will eventually become spaces of collective empowerment—whether they will become “heavens,” not just “havens,” as Manuel Castells puts it in relation to social movements in the “network society”—is an open question. We saw that, among Brazilians in South Florida, churches and congregations do indeed tap into the affective, axiological, and relational resources concentrated in the protected private sphere. Despite clear contradictions, churches have a good potential for strengthening bridging social action. According to Robert Putman, “faith communities in which people worship together are arguably the single most important repository of social capital in America.” They are “an important incubator for civic skills, civic norms, community interests, and civic recruitment.” Sociologist David Smilde argues that in Latin America religious movements such as evangelical Christianity can function as transnational “popular publics,” “intentionally organized relational context[s] in which

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a specific network of people from popular classes seek to bridge to other networks, form coalitions, and expand the influence of its discourses.” Whether religion among Brazilians in Broward County can contribute to the rise of popular publics will depend on the theologies and pastoral approaches developed by immigrant churches, particularly on how they explain and address the situation of immigrants in religious terms. Trends in the religious field in Brazil (and in Latin America, for that matter) do not give reason for optimism. In the s and s the Brazilian Catholic Church adopted a strong liberationist approach that stressed social justice and grassroots empowerment. Such an approach would dovetail nicely with efforts to build popular publics among immigrants in South Florida. However, today, this liberationist perspective shares the stage with the growing Charismatic Renewal Movement, which tends to take a more emotive, personalistic, and otherworldly pastoral style. Whether liberationist and charismatic modalities of Catholicism stand in tension with each other or cross-fertilize and, thus, strengthen each other depends ultimately on the priests’ leadership. We found both currents very much alive among Brazilians in Broward, operating more or less independently of each other. Dynamics within the Catholic Church intersect with the increasing influence of neo-Pentecostalism among Protestant circles. This Pentecostalism works with a gospel of health and wealth that, while strongly this-worldly, may discourage a holistic approach to self and society because it stresses the power of faith to achieve personal success and well-being. Despite trends in the religious field that may not be conducive to strengthening social action among immigrants, there are hopeful signs of the positive role that churches can play for Brazilians in Broward County. For example, as Souza Alves demonstrates in chapter , Nossa Senhora Aparecida Catholic Mission has a strong social outreach program, which is linked with the Scalabrinis and the transnational “pastoral do imigrante,” supported by the Brazilian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CNBB). The Brazilian Baptist Church has also been at the forefront of the Associação de Pastores, working to collect signatures in opposition to draconian immigration reform proposals in Congress. As researchers concerned with the dire plight of immigrants post-/, it behooves us not to reproduce unreflectively discourses about the lack of community. Instead, we must generate rigorous analytical work on the complexity and ambivalence of social action in multiple spatiotemporal scales. Hopefully, this work will spur new kinds of social outreach and network formation. NOTES

. Ana Cristina Martes, Brasileiros nos Estados Unidos: Um estudo sobre imigrantes em Massachusetts (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, ); Maxine Margolis, Little Brazil: An Ethnography of Brazilian Immigrants in New York City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); Teresa Sales, Brasileiros longe de casa (São Paulo: Editora Cortês, ).

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. Margolis, Little Brazil, . . Martes, Brasileiros nos Estados Unidos, –. . Ibid., . . Maxine Margolis, “Na virada do milênio: A emigração brasileira para os Estados Unidos,” in Fronteiras cruzadas: Etnicidade, gênero e redes sociais, ed. Ana Cristina Martes and Sorava Fleischer, – (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, ). . As stated in chapter , it was not possible to conduct a random survey of Brazilians in Broward County. Instead, we relied on the snowball technique. Thus, survey results should not be seen as representative of the entire universe. However, they identify certain significant patterns, which we cross-checked with other data derived from qualitative methods such as participant observation, interviewing, and focus groups. . Identification of community needs varied by gender: . percent of male respondents chose group solidarity as the most important need, the same percentage that selected legalization of immigrant status. For women, in contrast, group solidarity came in third place (with . percent), behind . percent for family and psychological counseling, and . percent who indicated that the most important need is adequate health care and medical assistance. During the interviewing process women consistently affirmed that, despite the hectic schedules and long distances, they did not lack meaningful friendships. However, they felt that pressure to ensure the well-being of their families fell disproportionately on them. This may explain why a higher percentage of them selected family and psychological counseling and health care as the most important community need. . Anthony Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (New York: Routledge, ). . David Kirp, Almost Home: America’s Love-Hate Relationship with Community (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . . See Ferdinand Tonnies, Community and Society (Edison, NJ: Transaction Publishers, ). He writes that community (Gemeinschaft) is characterized by a “reciprocal, binding sentiment as a peculiar will,” an “understanding (consensus). It represents the special social force and sympathy which keeps human beings together as members of a totality” (). In contrast, in society (Gesellschaft), “everybody is by himself and isolated, and there exists a condition of tension against all others. Their spheres of activity and power are sharply separated, so that everybody refuses to everyone else contact with and admittance to his sphere” (). . Roger Rouse, “Mexican Migration and the Space of Postmodernism,” Diaspora , no.  (): –. . Barry Wellman and S. D. Berkowitz, eds., Social Structures: A Network Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); J. Clyde Mitchell, Social Networks in Urban Situations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ); Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology , no.  (): –. . Alejandro Portes, ed., The Economic Sociology of Immigration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, ); Caroline Bretell and James Hollifield, Migration Theory: Talking across Disciplines (London: Rutledge, ); Cecilia Menjívar, Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); Jacqueline Hagan, “Social Networks, Gender and Immigrant Incorporation: Resources and Constraints,” American Sociological Review  (): –; Monica Boyd, “Family and Personal Networks in International Migration: Recent Developments and New Agendas,” International Migration Review , no.  (): –; Steven Vertovec, “Migration and Other Modes of Transnationalism: Towards Conceptual CrossFertilization.” International Migration Review , no.  (): –.

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. Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Chafetz, Religion across Borders: Transnational Immigrant Networks (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, ); Manuel A. Vásquez and Marie Friedmann Marquardt, Globalizing the Sacred: Religion across the Americas (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ). . Peter Dicken et al, “Chains and Networks, Territories and Scales: Towards a Relational Framework for Analyzing the Global Economy,” Global Networks , no.  (): –. . Wellman and Berkowitz, Social Structures, . . Harrison White, Identity and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). . Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin, “Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problems of Agency,” American Journal of Sociology , no.  (): –; Robert Fishman, Democracy’s Voices: Social Ties and the Quality of Public Life in Spain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ). . As we saw in the introduction, Portes has criticized the transnationalism literature for a similar “sampling on the dependent variable.” This criticism certainly helps us avoid making the faulty claim that transnationalism is the new paradigmatic mode of livelihood among immigrants. Nevertheless, foregrounding a phenomenon that has been ignored by dominant approaches can open new epistemological spaces. Alejandro Portes, “The Debates and Significance of Immigrant Transnationalism, Global Networks  (July ): –. . Alain Degenne and Michel Forse, Introducing Social Networks (London: Sage, ). . The average number of good friends in the city for men was six, whereas for women it was slightly less than five. Normally, we would expect women to have more dense interpersonal networks, but perhaps the process of migration transforms men’s sociability. . See Miller McGherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew E. Brashears, “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades,” American Sociological Review  (): –. . Barry Wellman, Peter Carrington, and Alan Hall, “Networks as Personal Communities,” in Social Structures, ed. Wellman and Berkowitz, –. . Ibid., . . Menjívar, Fragmented Ties, . . Ibid., . . Eduardo Guarnizo, Ignacio Sanchez, and E. M. Roach, “Mistrust, Fragmented Solidarity, and Transnational Migration: Colombians in New York City and Los Angeles,” Ethnic and Racial Studies  (): –; Sarah Mahler, American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). . David Kyle, Transnational Peasants: Migration, Networks, and Ethnicity in Andean Ecuador (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ); Mahler, American Dreaming; Patricia Pessar, “Sweatshop Workers and Domestic Ideologies: Dominican Women in New York’s Apparel Industry,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research , no.  (): –. . Howard Aldrich and Roger Waldinger, “Ethnicity and Entrepreneurship,” Annual Review of Sociology  (): –; Peter Li, “Occupational Achievement and Kinship Achievement among Chinese Immigrants in Chicago,” Sociological Quarterly  (): –. . Martes, Brasilieros nos Estados Unidos, . . Homo anomicus—the term “anomie” was first used by Emile Durkheim to characterize the breakdown of social norms connected with increasing social differentiation and specialization. More specifically, anomie refers to modern society’s failure to integrate

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the individual into its binding collective representations. The anomic individual is thus bereft of strong social ties and lacks a sense of belonging and collective identity. . Menjívar, Fragmented Ties, . . Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton-Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (New York: Gordon and Breach, ), . . Ibid. . Alejandro Portes, “Introduction: The Debates and Significance of Immigrant Transnationalism,” Global Networks , no.  (): –. . Rouse, “Mexican Migration and the Space of Postmodernism.” . Nina Glick Schiller, “Transmigrants and Nation-States: Something Old and Something New in the U.S. Experience,” in Handbook of International Migration, ed. Charles Hirshman et al. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, ), . . Peggy Levitt, “Transnational Migration: Taking Stock and Future Directions.” Global Networks , no.  (): –. . The activities described above stand in the middle of a continuum between what Levitt calls “core transnationalism”—regular and well-institutionalized practices that are “an integral part of the individual’s life”—and “expanded transnationalism,” which refers to occasional activities in response to crises. Ibid. . Peterson and Vásquez found a similarly vibrant “grassroots transnationalism” among Salvadoran charismatic Catholics in Washington, D.C., which is not matched in terms of frequency and extensiveness by the institutional church. Anna L. Peterson and Manuel A. Vásquez, “ ‘Upwards, Never Down’: The Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Transnational Perspective,” in Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas, ed. Anna Peterson, Manuel Vásquez, and Philip Williams, – (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ). . Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, “Social and Cultural Capital in the Urban Ghetto: Implications for the Economic Sociology of Immigration,” in The Economic Sociology of Immigration, ed. Alejandro Portes, (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, ), . . Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin, “Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problems of Agency,” American Journal of Sociology , no.  (): . . Monica Boyd, “Family and Personal Networks in International Migration: Recent Developments and New Agendas.” International Migration Review , no.  (): –. . There is a significant gender variation, only . percent of women surveyed stated that they work more than sixty hours, while . percent of men do. This variation may explain why a higher percentage of men consider group solidarity the single most important community need. They simply have less time to build powerfully affective bonds outside work. . Amy DeRogatis, Moral Geography: Maps, Missionaries, and the American Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, ). . Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . . Martes, Brasileiros nos Estados Unidos, . . Ibid., . . Ibid., . . On the notion of cultural tool kit, see Anne Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review  (): –.

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. Roberto DaMatta, O que faz o Brasil, Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, ), –. . For an interesting comparison, see Orsi’s treatment of the centrality of the domus, a notion that brings together the home and the extended family in a religio-moral unit, among Italian immigrants in Harlem. Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, – (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). . This finding resonates with the recent spatial turn in religious studies. Thomas Tweed, for example, writes that religion is about “constructing, adorning, and inhabiting domestic space. Religion, in this sense, is housework. It is homemaking.” Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), . . DaMatta, O que faz o Brasil, Brasil, . . Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. . This is the classic problem in anthropology of taking emic categories for etic concepts. I thank David Smilde for this insight and his helpful comments. . I thank Teresa Sales for this insight. . Robert Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century. The  Johan Skytte Prize Lecture,” Scandinavian Political Studies , no.  (): –. . Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, ). . Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Touchstone, ), . . David Smilde, “Popular Publics: Street Protest and Plaza Preachers in Caracas,” International Review of Social History, , no. supplement  (): . His notion of popular publics is an elaboration of philosopher Nancy Fraser’s concept of “subaltern counter-publics,” which she sees as “parallel discursive arena(s) where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter-discourse, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.” Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the Post-Socialist Condition (New York: Routledge, ), .

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From Jacaltenango to Jupiter Negotiating the Concept of “Family” through Transnational Space and Time SILVIA IRENE PALMA, CAROL GIRÓN SOLÓRZANO, AND TIMOTHY J. STEIGENGA

This chapter argues that “family” is a key concept for understanding the life of the Guatemalan immigrant community living in Jupiter, Florida. Family-related necessities serve as the primary motor of emigration. Preoccupation with the family is the principle axis in the hearts, minds, and daily lives of Jupiter’s immigrants. The strength of family ties are such that they allow immigrants to accept and tolerate the many sacrifices associated with daily living in a foreign and often hostile community. At the same time, the process of conducting multiple life histories, in-depth interviews, and focus groups with Jupiter’s immigrants illuminated the heavy burden created by the distance between the immigrants, their families, and their communities of origin. As sociologist Pierrette HondagneuSotelo has argued, these burdens underlie the fundamentally ambiguous (and increasingly common) construction of transnational families. In this chapter, we argue that Jupiter’s immigrants negotiate these tensions and transnational spaces with the assistance of local organizations and through the construction and reproduction of images associated with the passage of time: images of their home communities in the past, their present realities in Jupiter, and the conceptualization of a future which for the vast majority of the recent immigrants includes a return to their community of origin. According to the  census, approximately , Guatemalans live in the state of Florida, with approximately , located in Palm Beach County. These figures, however, drastically undercount the actual number of Guatemalan immigrants in Florida. In the case of Jupiter alone, our survey research and qualitative interviews suggest that the population of Guatemalans is closer to ,, the majority from Jacaltenango, a municipality located in the department of Huehuetenango in northwest Guatemala. As outlined in chapter , the first Jacaltecos arrived in Jupiter after a long and intense displacement between countries (Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States) and between various 57

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locations within the United States. They arrived in Florida for diverse reasons: from the need to safeguard their lives in the context of Guatemala’s intense armed conflict of the s to more recent waves of immigrants who come as international migrant workers to fill the demand for laborers in Jupiter’s burgeoning landscaping and construction industries. In this chapter we show how Guatemalan immigrants in Jupiter fulfill their commitments to their families in their communities of origin through working to produce remittances, frequent telephone communications, and other transnational connections. We demonstrate that the immigrants experience a daily tension: the need to take on the new values of the community in which they live in the United States (modernization, personal autonomy, self-control, and institutionalized norms) while also maintaining the values they bring with them from their community of origin (community values and traditional forms of family authority). These pressures induce difficult changes in the lives of immigrants. The communal and family authorities who would normally provide behavioral limits and norms in the community of origin are absent in Jupiter. In the absence of these family and group authorities, churches and other civic organizations take on, at least in a compensatory form, the roles of family members or other local authorities in providing a framework of self-control and an understanding of “proper” behavior. In short, these institutions assist migrants in meeting their family commitments, in spite of the difficulties of space and time that create distance between families. They also provide one of the scarce sources of “bridging” social capital for Jupiter’s Guatemalan immigrants. With regard to these dynamics, we observed important differences between distinct immigrant groups such as asylum seekers/refugees and recently arrived (and more likely to be undocumented) international migrant workers, between men and women, as well as among immigrants at different stages in life. On one hand, Jupiter may be understood as a community in which Guatemalan symbols and meanings of social and cultural order are recreated. At the same time, Jupiter is a disputed space, an environment of cultural appropriation and reproduction in which immigrants insert themselves while attempting to learn a new and different set of life skills appropriate to survival in an upscale Florida community. This tension requires a sharp learning curve and produces significant psychological and emotional stress among recent immigrants. Civic and religious organizations play a key role in mediating these tensions, reinforcing family ties, and connecting immigrants to organizational resources that might otherwise remain elusive.

Methodological Considerations The dynamics of daily life of the Jupiter Jacaltec community is complex and multifaceted. Thus it was necessary to design a methodology that began with an

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analysis of this reality and at the same time allowed the protagonists of the individual and collective stories to participate in the construction of their narratives in a self-reflective manner. As a consequence, our respondents were able to actively participate in the delineation of proactive survival strategies in their new environment. Our data collection focused on obtaining qualitative information through the use of field observation, life histories, focus groups, indepth interviews, and the development of communal timelines. The principal contribution of these procedures was the gradual and progressive generation of information that allowed new layers and complimentary themes to emerge as respondents described and discussed their daily community life. This methodological design favored a natural cognitive construction among respondents, whose narratives combined notions of time (past/present/future), circumstances and place (community of origin and receiving community), and multiple levels of community (personal, family, community, and nation). This process of selfreflection in respondent’s personal and collective stories confirmed the relative nature of their conceptions of space and time. We discovered that for immigrants in Jupiter, the community of origin appears in the past, but at the same time it exists in daily life in an imagined form and through the constant desire to fulfill responsibilities to family members at home. Probing this generally invisible dual sense of time and place uncovered real tensions between there and here, then and now. Jupiter represents the present, with a daily life of working, paying rent, and seeking shelter. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine a clear present or future in the home community, particularly because the very presence of the significant numbers of Jacaltecos in Jupiter provokes irrevocable changes in the places and the people they have left behind.

The Family as Motive for Immigration: Past, Present, and Future Images The family clearly constitutes the principal motor of recent Guatemalan immigration to Jupiter. Nevertheless, the centrality of the role of family varies between different migrant groups, especially between refugees and the more recent international migrant workers. For the more recent immigrants, thoughts of the family at home serve as the basis for tolerating the adversity of daily life and the difficulties of finding and keeping steady work in Jupiter. The family is associated with the realization of hopes and dreams structurally integrated with the following elements: sustaining a basic well-being and a better standard of living, strengthening the capacity (generally through education) of family members, and creating a basis for a better life for the next generation. In the words of one respondent, “I came here for my young children. . . . [M]y wife was always telling me that we simply did not have enough money, and I was

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desperate, so we decided that it would be better if I left, because otherwise we were not going to make it.” These sentiments were common among the majority of our male respondents. As another Jacaltec father explained, “I had to come, work was scarce, and I have three children who are growing and who need everything. My wife didn’t really say much but I knew she was worried about us. When I told her that I was going to come here, the first thing she said to me was, what would she do by herself, and then she asked what money I was going to use to pay for the trip. . . . Now what makes me feel better is that they’re better, and my wife tells me how she feels.” When we examine immigrants’ images of family life in the sending community, at one level we find an almost idealized version of the family. In other words, when Jupiter’s immigrants think of their families, they think of unity, happiness, communication, shared celebrations, and shared spaces. These positive thoughts are, however, a photographic negative of another set of grave concerns that immigrants simultaneously entertain about their families, the very concerns that drive them to make the dangerous trek from Jacaltenango to Jupiter in the first place: poverty, a lack of economic opportunity, and worries about the future of their families and communities of origin. When asked to describe family life in the home community, one of our Jacaltec respondents exhorted, “Yes! Jacal is really beautiful. There you can live peacefully and happy, although you have to eat beans with tortillas you at least eat all together. . . . [T]he boys can play in the street; the women go to the market, and at least you have some time to rest.” These positive elements are maintained as an image of the past. But the present brings other concerns and troubles. In the present, the distance between immigrants and their families brings concerns about family disintegration, insecurity, the potential for infidelity, and profound concern for their children. In particular, the young male immigrants worry about the management of their households, their potential loss of authority, and the rapid social changes taking place among their children, accelerated by new modes of technology available in Jacaltenango, such as cell phones and the Internet. In the words of one young man, “You’re asking me about here [Jupiter] and not Jacal? Look, here life is hard because I don’t have anyone to cook for me or wash my clothes. There my kids behave well; when I talk to my oldest son I tell him to listen to his mother because he’s the man of the house now and it’s his job to take care of them. I give my kids permission to go out only if my wife tells me they’ve been good; if not, they can’t.” As another Jacalteco explained, “Nothing’s the same anymore. . . . [I]t’s harder because you’re not with them; you have to be clear when you tell them what you want. When I send money my wife already knows what it’s for and what she has to spend it on, and I’m clear about how long it has to last, so she knows that it’s hard here too. But there’s no problem with her because she’s good and she never asks me for anything. To the contrary, I’m

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always asking her if she needs anything. The other day I helped her buy medicine for her mother who had gotten sick.” Those who remained behind in Jacaltenango expressed a reciprocal set of issues and concerns for the present. During our interviews in Jacaltenango on Father’s Day in , we asked the children present if they would like us to carry messages back to Jupiter with us for their fathers. The vast majority of the children exhorted their fathers to be safe, to come home soon, and, most frequently, to no chupar (not drink). Wives and mothers expressed similar worries, including concerns about infidelity. As Jocelyn Sabbagh has recently argued, the issue of transnational gossip plays a key role in framing the tension between images of the present and the future for transnational families in both the sending and receiving communities. As one of her Jacaltec respondents explained, “When men leave, we are afraid of gossip. Because when men are over there [in the United States], people tell them that we are doing bad things. That is my fear. What if my husband hears a rumor about me? What if he leaves me because of it? What will happen to me and my children?” Back in Jupiter, another respondent described the other side of the scenario: “For example, there are a lot of guys here that have another woman and some even forget about their family that they left in Jacaltenango, and they leave the poor wife alone with the kids and they’re here unhappy, drinking, and with another woman.” While these ambivalent and problematic images of the present may appear self-evident, they serve as a necessary corrective to descriptions of transnationalism that may otherwise verge on the celebratory. Returning to Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo’s warning, it is worth recognizing the construction of transnational families “as an achievement, but one that is accompanied by numerous costs and attained in a context of extremely scarce options.” The role of transnational gossip in the complex web of social remittances surely merits further research and attention. Turning to an imagined future, most of our respondents associated families with great hope and enthusiasm, in spite of the fact that the actual date of return remained uncertain. As one Jacalteco put it, “I don’t have an exact return date, but what I do know is that I’m going back soon. I just have to save some cash so when I get back to Jacal I can do something. Right now, I’ve been here three years and I’m still not used to it because I miss my town; there you can relax and have a conversation! When I get back I’m going to start some kind of business. I don’t know what yet.” The temporal uncertainty of family reunification was a common theme among our interviews in Jupiter. One respondent said, “The only thing we could do for our children was to come to the United States. My wife was crying and she didn’t want me to go, but I had to do it for the kids. . . . [H]ere I’m going to work for about three years, I think, and then return to Guatemala because my

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children need me.” The words of another Jacaltec father capture the common sentiments we discovered in our interviews and focus groups: “I just spoke on the phone to Guatemala. . . . I was desperate here [almost crying] because everything is different here; life is harder; people are different; what is most difficult is to be far from my wife and kids. The worst thing is that finding work is hard and it doesn’t pay well. If only I could be there now, but I can’t.” In sum, for the vast majority of our respondents, family is the principal motive for migration. The effort and risks undertaken can only be explained by the search for better living conditions for family members. The image of the family is frozen somewhere between an idealized past and the difficult reality of the present. The reestablishment of a unified family life lies in an undetermined future.

Gender and Migratory Flow: Key Variables for Understanding Family Relations Gender and temporal location within migration flows are two key variables that frame the images of family held among immigrants in Jupiter. Table . provides a succinct outline of the key differences in family dynamics between men and women and different times and status of migration. Here we see some of the differences in family relations among different groups of immigrants from the same location. Asylees and the family members who came to join them frequently suffer difficulties with cultural adjustment and cultural differences, particularly with children who are born in Jupiter. The mothers of these children suffer the greatest amount of isolation, sometimes even within their own family. As one young mother explained, “What you see now is that our kids have already learned English in school, and some don’t want to speak Spanish, not even at home, and so their parents are having problems with them. But other kids, now that they know English, help their parents when they go out to places like the hospital or they need to communicate.” These tensions are not limited to those with children born in the United States. In some cases, the tensions are even greater between parents who have papers and their grown children who followed them. As one young man put it, Me, when I came to Jupiter [two years ago] I came here to live in a rental with my dad [he already lived in the United States] but after a little while I moved out because we had a lot of problems; he complained to my mother [by phone] all the time and we fought almost every day because he didn’t like the friends that I hang out with. Now I live somewhere else and I’ve bought my own car to go to work in and to go out with my buddies on weekends to dance since my dad doesn’t hassle me anymore,

Many are adults, alone, without family commitments in the community of origin

Communication problems are apparent in the new context due to the tendency to reproduce inappropriate systems of control

Constant communication with family

Maintenance of the family unit in the new context

Possible loss of contact with family members in Guatemala

Difficulty in the relationship with children who arrived young or were born in the U.S.

Cultural discrimination because of language and social isolation, even within the family unit

Difficulty in the relationship with children who arrived young or were born in theU.S.

Interfamily violence

Preoccupation for mothers in Guatemala

Relatively greater liberty due to obtaining work that provides independent income and due to the distance from family/ community in Guatemala

Inter-generational difficulties especially between children born in the U.S. and their parents

Maintenance of the family unit in the new context

A family support system has been put into place for the arrival of Mayan international migrant workers

Preoccupation for children/spouse/ mother/father

Men who are alone but with commitments in Guatemala

Family ties have facilitated migration of other groups

Relationship with the family continues but is less strong

Reunited

Family relations

Asylees

workers

Migrant workers

Migrant

Reunited

Asylees

flow

Women

Migratory

Men

Images of the Family Held by Guatemalans in Jupiter

TABLE 3.1

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even though when I call my mom she always tells me to behave; why don’t I send enough money, and here sometimes there’s enough work and sometimes there isn’t.

A relatively common element among the distinct groups of Guatemalan immigrants in Jupiter is the attempt to reproduce social and cultural gender roles and expectations from the communities of origin. In other words, there is an implicit (and sometimes explicit) expectation that women should behave in the same manner that they behave in the community of origin. Not surprisingly, this provokes serious tension and causes many women to suffer social isolation and/or physical and emotional violence in the home. In the words of one young Jacaltec man, “Here women aren’t the same as the ones in Jacaltenango; when they come here they want to behave differently since here they work. . . . [O]thers are worse! They want to go to the dances and some actually drink! Here if they have a bad friend they become bad too. But there are others who, when they get to Jupiter, they find their husband right away and stay at home; they only work if they have permission and they watch the kids.” For some of the immigrant women, the new context allows opportunities to question their traditional roles and provides opportunities for outside assistance in the event of interfamilial violence. Local churches, social service organizations, and county programs offer the opportunity for women to escape situations of domestic abuse and to augment their self-esteem through participation in local programs for immigrant women. Although the problems of isolation and abuse remain grave, our research uncovered cases of women who had effectively used local support networks to extract themselves from situations of domestic violence and, in the process, adopt a new and different set of values that allowed them greater freedom and autonomy. The story of one young Mexican mother, though harrowing, illustrates this process of transformation: My husband changed a lot. Two years ago my husband hit me hard, we always fought, and he took whatever I earned. One day, since I worked, he came home and asked me for money and hit me in the face, then gave me a kick and I fainted and could hardly see my two boys. The police came and an ambulance to bring me to the hospital. . . . My husband was in jail for a month, and during that month I had a lot of work and I even went to Disney and spent like $, with my kids. . . . [A]fter a year he had a car and rent money so I went back to him. I didn’t go back because I wanted a husband, rather because my boys needed their dad and were bad psychologically, and one of them was pulling his hair out and a psychologist told me it was because he missed him. Now we’re okay; now I don’t ask him permission for anything. Now I participate in an association and I go out when I want.

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Work as the Path to Facilitating Jacaltec Dreams According to studies conducted by the program DECOPAZ/PNUD-UNOPS in the year , Jacaltenango suffered from severe problems of unemployment and poverty. The unemployment rate among the population between fifteen and twenty-nine years old was . percent, for those between thirty and thirty-four it is . percent, and over forty-five it was . percent. In a separate report on poverty rates in Guatemala conducted by SEGEPLAN in ,  percent of Jacaltenango’s population was reported as living in poverty, with  percent rated as living in extreme poverty. With prospects for work scarce to non-existent in Jacaltenango, it is no surprise that many Jacaltec families choose a survival strategy which includes sending a family member to seek employment through the well-established route from Jacaltenango to Jupiter. According to the most recent census,  households ( percent of the total households in the municipality) report at least one family member living in the United States. Clearly, finding and keeping a job in Jupiter is a critical element of the survival strategy of many Jacaltecos and the key to their dream of a better life for their family. As one young mother explained, “I work cleaning houses. When I arrived in Jupiter I had really bad experiences with work; now I’m better because I learned. I don’t care about how hard the work is; the important thing is to send money back to my girls, who are with my mother.” The income differential between Jacaltenango and Jupiter is sufficiently great that immigrants are willing to take the risks associated with the long and difficult passage and to suffer the difficulties of working in the Jupiter environment. As one lawn-care worker put it, “Here you earn well; the only thing is that it’s really hard because you have to spend all day in the hot sun cutting the grass. But here what you earn in two weeks you don’t earn in two months there. When I got here it took a while to learn to use the machinery.” This worker’s financial estimation was borne out in our survey results. We found that pay rates for immigrant labor in Jupiter oscillate between $. and $. per hour, depending upon level of experience and type of work. In Guatemala, the going rate for agricultural work is  Quetzales per day ($.) with a working day that frequently runs as long as ten hours. According to our survey results, the average weekly income among immigrants in Jupiter is $, more than double a month’s pay for an agricultural worker in Guatemala. The majority of Jupiter’s Guatemalan immigrants arrive with little formal education and almost no English-speaking ability. Thus they are employed primarily in jobs that require little education or technical skills, such as landscaping, gardening, golf course maintenance, and construction. While there is consensus that learning English is the key to better pay and more stable employment, the daily demands of work combined with the notion of imminent return to the sending community keep many immigrants from improving their

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English-speaking abilities. As one young worker explained, “I began to go to English classes, but then I stopped going because I got back late from work. . . . [S]ome Jacaltecos speak English because they’re really smart, but others like me aren’t interested. You can’t just not go to work two hours a day to go to school, because what’s your family supposed to do if you don’t send money?” Jupiter’s Guatemalan immigrants take great pride in their work and the fact that they are considered excellent workers by their employers. Indeed, among both the employers and the employees we interviewed, there was unanimous agreement about the quality of Guatemalan workers. In the words of another Jacaltec worker, “Americans say that the Guatemalans are great workers because we’ll do whatever they ask. It’s true, because I was doing the garden in my boss’s house, and he asked if I could fix some floors in his kitchen and, even though I don’t understand English that well, I told him that I would. He was really happy with my work and now calls me for any job.” As another explained, “I work with a gringo from Boca Raton—I go with him to paint houses, to do repairs and all kinds of things, and then he drops me off at my place. I’ve worked with him for a while and he likes the way I work; he says that even though I’m only twentythree I’m strong because I help him carry all the material with no problem.” Despite their reputation as excellent workers, there are many obstacles that stand between the new Guatemalan arrivals and their ultimate dreams of returning home with enough money to support their families. Although their jobs are primarily in manual labor, they require immigrants to quickly learn how to use the proper machinery, how to engage in systems of work contracting, and a minimal understanding of English so that they can follow directions at work. As one recently arrived Guatemalan put it, “When I arrived, my very first night here they already told me how life really was here, and they told me that the next day I had to start working with them, that I would have to learn to use the machinery if I wanted to earn more. They told me what Guatemalans do here.” Another respondent echoed these sentiments, “When I got here it was like two in the morning, but the next evening they told me I had work, that I’d have to learn to use the lawn equipment if I wanted to earn better. . . . [T]he first thing I remember them telling me is that the food is different here and that it’s not as easy as everyone thought. . . . [T]hat made me think.” Once the preliminary necessities of finding work and a place to stay have been completed, the third major obstacle blocking the immigrant’s long-term dream of sending funds home to their families is debt. The majority of Jupiter’s most recent Guatemalan immigrants contract the services of “coyotes” to assist them in the difficult process of traversing Mexico, crossing the border, and making the trek from the border to Jupiter. During our research in , we found that the average cost for such services was $, per person. Respondents reported, however, that the cost increases annually and has jumped significantly since the mid s with the institution of various

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programs to tighten the border. According to one respondent, “Look, here most come with a coyote. The only thing is that they charge a lot, but they’re good because in the end they get you here. My brother-in-law helped me because he was the one who asked the coyote to help me, and we only paid a part there and he paid the other half here when I arrived. What happened on the way here isn’t important anymore—what matters is that I’m here.” Living conditions for immigrants are particularly difficult, as rental space in Jupiter is scarce and the cost of living is high. For those who come to work in Jupiter, there are many hardships and sacrifices before the dream of building capital begins to come true. In the words of one Jacaltec respondent, “To me it’s not important that I have a lot of money here, only that I have enough. The most important is rent, and the rest I send to Guatemala because my wife has to pay the debt that I have there that’s for the coyote, she has to take some for household expenses, and the most important is to buy things for my kids’ school.” As another explained, “I think that the most difficult thing for me here was to pay the debt, because I sent and sent money to my village and almost all of it was to pay the coyote and hardly anything was left over for my family. I’ve paid off the debt there, I only owe a little here, but they’re more patient here, so now my wife receives a few more pennies. Yeah, I always send for the Fiesta de Candelaria to buy something special.” For Guatemalan immigrants in Jupiter, work also provides a space for socialization and exchange with other immigrants, including Mexicans, Colombians, Haitians, and others. This exchange assists Guatemalans in learning the rules and expectations of contract labor, negotiation of wages, and other survival strategies. For example, the employers who used to contract the daylaborers congregated each day on Center Street were aware that the workers would not contract with them for less than a certain minimum of hours and/or daily wage. These wage and hourly parameters were set informally in the street and communicated to the new arrivals so that they would not upset the balance and pay scale. As one day-laborer explained, “We on Center Street already have an agreement that we won’t go with a boss who pays less than we want. . . . Sometimes people are desperate that no one will hire them because it’s already noon and then a boss arrives who wants to pay $. an hour and they go because they want to have work and we yell at them, ‘Don’t go, man! It’s better to lose a day’s work than giving your labor away!’ If we permit this, they won’t want to pay anything.” As we might expect, the newest arrivals generally occupied the lowest rung on the ladder of day-labor opportunities on the street corner market. Because the process of day labor is informal, those with the most work experience, the most English-speaking ability, more established networks, and their own mode of transportation are more likely to find work. The newest arrivals have also been the most likely to be taken advantage of by employers. Workers report

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frequent cases of employers who promise a weekly check but disappear at the end of the week after the work has been completed. Because many of the workers are undocumented, they fear local authorities and frequently do not report these abuses. As one day-laborer explained, “We’ve had some bad experiences. I mean, almost every day something happens with one of our countrymen; sometimes there are people getting workers and they contract them for two weeks but only pay them one. It can happen because then the boss doesn’t show up on the last day of the second week when it’s time to pay. . . . [and] even though the people know where the American lives, they don’t say anything because they’re scared they’ll call immigration. What can they do for us? There are lots of cases like this, all the time, who don’t pay us!” The struggle to find work is only the beginning. Because contractors pick up laborers starting at : a.m. in the morning, workdays frequently run from : a.m. until : or : p.m. Work in construction and landscaping is physically demanding and requires attention to detail. Thus, for many workers, the hours, days, weeks, months, and years pass as they concentrate on the immediate demands of their labor. Most return to their crowded apartments exhausted, with little time to address daily necessities (shopping for food, washing clothing, and medical issues), let alone time for recreation or interaction with friends. Many respondents described their experience of the passage of time in Jupiter as a near dream state, a rhythm of work and sleep that is only rarely interspersed with the opportunity for recreation or social gatherings. Nonetheless, these sacrifices are made in the name of complying with their primary responsibilities as fathers, providers, and moral leaders of their families back home. The money earned is regularly channeled to the community of origin to provide for the family. In some cases these remittances come at the expense of basic necessities for the workers themselves. According to one daylaborer we interviewed while he was waiting to find work, “I always have to send the money to my family. What I earn is for them, and I keep rent money, money for calling cards since I call once a week, sometimes every three days, depending on my mood. . . . I can stop eating, but not stop calling Guatemala.”

Remittances: The Key Transnational Connection with Home Our collective and individual interviews suggest that there are four primary motivations that drive the process of sending economic remittances to the home community. First and foremost, the money is sent to satisfy family needs, from daily necessities such as food and clothing to long-term costs such as healthcare and education. Second, the funds are transferred to pay debts to coyotes and other debts incurred by the family. Third, the money is intended to facilitate the dreams of a better life for family members in the future, through education and through the hope of establishing a long-term survival strategy

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through initiating a business transaction or purchasing land. Finally, some immigrants remit for community projects, generally through transnational religious connections. The sending of remittances is fairly regularized among Guatemalans in Jupiter, with a little more than half sending funds monthly. In our survey, we found that . percent send between $ and $ monthly; . percent send between $ and $; . percent remit between $ and $; . percent remit between $ and $,; and . percent remit between $, and $,. In terms of frequency, we found that only . percent send remittances once a year and . percent send bi-annually. As a regularized process, . percent of our respondents reported that they remit monthly, with . percent reporting bi-monthly remittances. It is important to point out, however, that these transfers do not necessarily translate into community development in the sending community. Furthermore, the longer an immigrant stays in the United States, the trend is that the amount and frequency of remittances diminishes. After living for thirteen years in Florida, one Jacalteco explained, “When I came I always sent more money to my mother; on the other hand, now I can’t anymore because I have other commitments.” In one sense, remittance sending serves as a partial antidote to the feelings of guilt and nostalgia immigrants feel as they live and work so far away from their families. Remittances allow fathers to fulfill both the role of provider and the traditional role of decision-maker in the family, as the economic force of their remittances serves as a replacement for their physical presence in the home. As one father pointed out, “I can’t be with them; at least I can send money, you know? If not, why am I their father? They know if I’m far away it’s because the situation is difficult and I want them to be well.” The final mode of remittance sending relates to community projects. These forms of remitting are sporadic and generally require a formal or informal transnational connection between Jupiter and Jacaltenango. In this case, institutions and groups connected with the Catholic Church have played a key role. For example, the Tepeyac Project, connected with a local Catholic Church near Jupiter, has channeled immigrant remittances and sought external funding to assist the Nutritional Center Hospital in Jacaltenango. Informal collection of funds to return the dead to be buried in Jacaltenango represents another such transnational connection. As with conceptions of the family, the role and process of remittance sending varies with gender and location within the migration stream. Table ., provides a brief summary of the key differences between these groups. While the economic aspects of remittances are critical, as Peggy Levitt and others have argued, remittances are much more than simple economic transactions. As discussed in chapter , social remittances include ideas, social capital, cultural practices, technology, and other factors that flow between the sending

Eventual sending to the community

Scarce sending of remittances

Constant sending of remittances for family survival/ debt payment

No sending of remittances

Probable improved working conditions

Interest in sending diminishes

Young people in competition with others of different nationalities (Mexicans, Haitians, others)

Contribution to family survival

Constant sending of remittances to children/debt

Labor diversification Socialization with men of diverse nationalities

Not for family survival in the community of origin

Low income Heavy labor

Remittances

Better work conditions/family support networks

Improved opportunities/ conditions Better income May be owners

Reunited

Work

Asylees

workers

Migrant workers

Migrant

Reunited

Asylees

Migratory

Women

flow

Men

TABLE 3.2

The Role of Remittances

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and receiving communities. These transnational connections affect lifestyle, aesthetic notions of beauty, clothing styles, uses of technology, communication, and value changes. While financial remittances are the primary vehicle connecting family members, immigrants send home much more than just their money. As one respondent explained, “I’ve already sent clothes and shoes to my kids. It was a very small box because postage is really expensive. I took advantage and sent some toys and gifts for my wife and some things for my mother. They were really happy, and when I talked to them they told me they liked them a lot.” Thus, remittances include more than funds, but also articles for the home, computer equipment, cellular phones, videos and DVDs, clothing, and other items. These forms of exchange allow the family in the community of origin to become more familiar with the social environment in which the immigrant is located. They become a transnational cultural and material bridge, which, in turn, frequently serves as the motivation for new waves of migration, particularly among the younger generation. As one migrant explained, “When I call I tell them it’s nice here, that it’s really different. I tell them about my work, and I also tell them that there are a lot of modern things here . . . but I also tell them that here life is hard, that it’s really difficult to earn money.” In the words of another young Jacaltec worker, “Ah! Yes, I tell my buddies that they should study and get their teaching degrees and then come. Yes, I do think that Jacaltecs are going to keep coming here; we all know each other and help each other, and anyway it’s hard there to get a teaching degree and it doesn’t pay well.”

Transnational Communication: Reach Out and Touch Jacaltenango Communication via telephone forms a critical part of immigrant’s strategies for surviving the daily hardships imposed by time and space. In the process, families in the rural and isolated communities of origin have become rapidly socialized into the use of telecommunication tools, including cell phones, text messaging, and the Internet. As one of our Jacaltec respondents explained, “Here there are phone cards for calling Jacaltenango. You can get ones for different prices, depending on how long you want to talk. Here almost everyone buys a card; when we speak during the week we buy one for $., but for the weekend we buy one for $. or $. because we have more time.” The use of the phone cards establishes regularized and critical communication between transmigrants and their family members. Another respondent emphasized the centrality of this communication in his case: “Me, the last time my mother got sick, I called every day to see how she was; thank God there’s a phone! That’s why the first thing I bought my mother in Guatemala was a telephone; she just told me how much it cost and I sent her the money, because before we had to go with the man at the store and it was more expensive, but he let us use it.”

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The sending of audio cassettes, videos of celebrations and events, and video recorders so that videos from the home community can be returned also forms part of this transnational network of communication. For the most part, these forms of remittances demonstrate emotional ties of love, loyalty, and mutual celebration to be shared by family members separated by time and space. Once again, however, these transnational lines of communication are a double-edged sword. As the young spouse of one of Jupiter’s migrants explained when she was interviewed in Jacaltenango, “There is a problem here; when there is a party or festival, the first thing people do is film it. They film it and later send the video to our husbands in Jupiter. This sometimes creates conflicts; say sometimes you are just dancing and they start saying things that are not true just because you were dancing. So I am a little bit afraid of that. I am not doing anything wrong, but people always comment on everything, so you have to always be careful.” Again, the potential for transnational gossip foments divisions and inhibits the behavior of spouses who remain in Jacaltenango. Furthermore, the cost of all of these forms of communication demands a significant portion of the earnings for transmigrants. By our estimates, the costs of calling home take up nearly  percent of the average monthly income of Jupiter’s transmigrants. During the past few years, the number of companies offering various phone cards in Jupiter has multiplied significantly. Our preliminary estimates suggest that the average immigrant in Jupiter spends between $ and $ per month purchasing international calling cards. Considering the  census figure of , Guatemalans living in Florida (a figure which, we have already noted, drastically undercounts Guatemalans), we can conservatively estimate that Guatemalan immigrants in Florida spend between $ and $ million a month communicating with friends and family in Guatemala. A  study of phone calls between the United States and Guatemala counted ,, calls adding up to ,, minutes of airtime. The companies benefiting most from these conversations include Americatell, Sprint, AT&T, MCI, and BellSouth. Preliminary calculations, based on a cost of $ per  minutes of airtime ( figures), suggest that these firms likely brought in close to $ million in calls to Guatemala alone. The magnitude of these economic interactions remains relatively invisible and has yet to enter into any official discourse on migration with governmental authorities either in the United States or in Guatemala. From another perspective, we can see that the use of these new modes of communication have created new notions of time and space among Guatemalan immigrants and their families. Unlike in Mexico, where this process unfolded over a long history of migration, in Guatemala the changes have been abrupt and drastic. These frequent communications have allowed immigrants to continue with their roles and functions within family life in the present in a manner that differs from past waves of migration. Thus, migrant

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fathers frequently continue in their role as moral guide, authority, and decision maker for the family at home in the community of origin. As one young father explained, We talk about everything by phone; she tells me how the family is, if everything is okay. We also talk about stuff that’s going on, about my kids’ school. . . . [F]or example, I spoke with her two days ago and she told me that my in-laws had gone to Huehuetenango and she also told me that everyone is getting ready for the fiesta in Jacaltenango; we talked about all that. She asks permission to go see her parents; she tells me if they call from school or if she needs to buy something. That’s right, she cannot leave town. I don’t give her permission to do that and she knows it; that’s why she never says anything about it, because there she has everything.

To a large degree, these new and frequent forms of communication are contributing to a redefinition and reconfiguration of family relations in the communities of origin. Studies in Guatemala have concluded that these mediums of communication have introduced new and foreign values that are rapidly altering family and community relations. Foremost among these changes is the desire for “modern” conveniences and styles that have been transmitted through social remittances. While ideas, styles, and demands have changed, the material economic basis of life in the home community has not. One consequence of this process is an increase in the motivation for further migration, as individuals and families come to the realization that their material resources and opportunities in Guatemala will never match the new expectations and values generated through contact with their family members in the United States.

The Role of Religious and Civic Organizations The role of religious and civic institutions among the immigrant population in Jupiter also has much to do with time and location of arrival within the immigrant stream. Guatemalans who arrived in Florida during Guatemala’s civil war were more likely to have the opportunity to apply for asylum and to eventually gain legal status. Thus, these initial war refugees and their families have been able to establish deep roots in the Jupiter area. They have more connections to local institutions, greater opportunities for education, and often serve as leaders and resources for newer arrivals. This is not the case with the postwar flows of Guatemalan immigrants. For these later arrivals, their primarily non-authorized status and lower levels of education and economic status have limited their process of integration into the local community. Thus, local civil and religious organizations have taken on the role of cultural reproduction while simultaneously serving as a bridge between the immigrants and local authorities.

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The role of religious and civic organizations in Jupiter is complex and constantly changing. For the most part, these organizations evolve as they assist immigrants with the adjustments necessary for living in a very new and different environment. Initially, some of these organizations (such as the Mayan Jacaltec Association) tended to replicate schemes and models of organization that originated in the community of origin. Over time, however, they have evolved and adjusted to meet the social and political requirements of the new community, establishing more formalized ties, creating institutional status, and promoting linkages with local and state authorities. The evolution of the organization Corn-Maya provides one such example. Beginning with the informal planning of the Jacaltec Maya Association for the first Fiesta Maya in Jupiter, the evolution of Corn-Maya as a political and social organization was initiated. Thus, an organization with an informal nature has evolved into an official nonprofit organization which has successfully brought resources to Jupiter’s immigrant community (ESL classes, health and human services, counseling, mobile consulates, and other services), served as a key link between immigrants and town authorities, and worked to secure stable working conditions for immigrant laborers through the creation of a neighborhood resource center. At the same time, Corn-Maya serves as a vehicle for cultural reproduction, sponsoring soccer leagues and organizing the annual Fiesta Maya. The principal actions or motivations among the institutional and informal groups in Jupiter include public policy issues (such as lobbying for changes in immigration policy), cultural reproduction (such as soccer games and the Fiesta Maya), actions designed to project civic participation (such as participation in community cleanups or working to promote the neighborhood resource/labor center), solidarity and reinforcement of relations with the community of origin (such as sending back the dead and communal remittances), and the exercise of spiritual life (including official religious affiliation and participation as well as prayer groups and participation in traditional Mayan rituals and practices). The tangible results of these actions are further outlined in chapters  and . The level of cohesion between diverse groups and organizations in Jupiter is flexible and dynamic. While certain events and services bring large numbers of Guatemalans (and other immigrants) together, there are also points of controversy and division. As noted in chapter , ethnic and religious divisions frequently limit broad-based cooperation among immigrant groups. Nonetheless, certain events, such as the  visit of Guatemalan vice president Eduardo Stein and the  visit by President Oscar Berger (organized by Corn-Maya), bring together diverse groups who might otherwise not communicate on a regular basis. On one level, some of the tensions that exist between immigrant groups in Palm Beach County reflect historic tensions between ethnic groups in Guatemala. Interviews with key informants suggest that some of the difficulties of cooperation between Jacaltecos and Q’anjob’ales can be traced to conflicts

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between these groups that date back to the colonial period in Guatemala. Some of the indigenous leaders we interviewed referenced the fact that Jacaltenango was the center of an encomienda during the colonial period, which led to conflicts with the Q’anjob’al population living in the periphery of the region. According to some of our informants, historical animosities continue to complicate relations between these two ethnic groups, with immigrants geographically concentrated in the two cities of Jupiter (Jacaltecos) and Lake Worth (Q’anjob’ales). The case of Jupiter suggests that local institutions can serve as a bridge to local and intergovernmental authorities. The sister city initiative (see chapters  and ) between Jacaltenango and Jupiter can serve as a model for other immigrant communities. This accord was possible due to a combination of factors, including connections between the local university (Florida Atlantic University), Jupiter’s new planned urban community (Abacoa), and institutional actors in Guatemala (such as INCEDES, the Central American Institute for Social Research and Development). It is precisely these kinds of transnational cooperative networks and their attendant bridging social capital that make local immigrantserving organizations most effective.

Concluding Thoughts The factors that drive the process of migration from Jupiter to Jacaltenango have not changed sufficiently to slow the flow of migrants. Furthermore, the exchange of resources, information, experiences, values, and knowledge acquired by the immigrants and their families, rather than diminishing migration, are more likely to increase the motivations for those left behind in Jacaltenango to consider migrating as well. In Jupiter, the primary factor affecting the lives of migrants is their status as documented or undocumented. Relations between Jacaltenango and Jupiter, between families, and between institutions are all affected by this key variable. Family life in Jupiter, relations with families in Jacaltenango, the fulfillment of responsibilities to the home community, and participation in civic and religious organizations are all conditioned by migratory status. Those who came as refugees can participate with some degree of ease in multiple organizations that reproduce their culture. On the other hand, when these same individuals are members of evangelical churches, or if they become charismatic Catholics who participate intensively in their churches, they tend to have the resources to cognitively construct an image of their future that includes remaining in the United States. In these cases, reflection upon the past can be painful, and there is a tendency to disconnect with families and friends in the community of origin. The establishment of support networks in Jupiter favors the insertion of newcomers into the labor market and assists in their daily survival. But these

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processes also come with high costs for the new immigrants as they struggle to negotiate the tensions between the rules of life in Jupiter and the values and authority that come from the community of origin. Religious institutions serve as sources of both bonding and bridging social capital. They promote religious doctrines that serve, to some degree, to reproduce and strengthen ties with the home community (ties to the past, in the case of the Catholic Church) and/or new relations with the new community of origin (ties to the future in the case of the evangelicals and charismatic Catholics). For immigrant women in search of a better life in Jupiter, the option of the “stable husband” emerges as a key variable. Men who work hard, fulfill their role as provider, and do not waste family resources on drinking are in high demand. To some degree, this translates into a certain form of pressure for the young men who seek to live up to this image of the potentially “good husband.” The pressure is increased because the same demands are translated across borders from mothers, fathers, and other family members. Among the young immigrants, these pressures lead to varying patterns of behavior (from bouts of drinking to sudden religious conversions), but with the constant risk of being devalued by the community for improper behavior. For this reason, the concerns of this group of young immigrants are particularly acute, as is the necessity to constantly remember the old patterns of conduct from the community of origin. As a consequence of these pressures, we noted the tendency of many of these young immigrants to participate in civic or religious organizations that offer a certain degree of institutional control (such as charismatic prayer groups or evangelical churches). However, the daily pressures of seeking work and living far from home frequently lead to backsliding and a pattern of passages in and out of different religious communities. The role of Jupiter’s immigrant organizations and the reach of their influence have been developed in a context that has slowly and fitfully created greater receptivity on the part of the receiving community. In the future, it will be critical to fortify these organizations through the active inclusion and attention to the needs of two previously underrepresented groups: immigrant women and the children of immigrants reunified with their families or those born in the United States. The transnational initiatives undertaken in Jupiter (such as the sister city agreement) have been important for the immigrant community because they have facilitated communication, diminished feelings of distance, and favored better conditions for groups who are frequently excluded from political and economic initiatives in their communities of origin. In the future, Jupiter’s immigrants face the challenge of promoting development in the home community, combined with the opportunity for mutual cultural exchange. This will require the reframing of the manner through which immigration has been understood in both the sending and the receiving community, both by the immigrants themselves and by their families at home.

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It remains to be seen how the values and cultural practices of the community of origin will continue to interact and evolve with the values of the receiving community. These processes of transition must be understood by taking into account the life cycle of the migrants, with particular attention to the case of the young migrants who have yet to develop the emotional maturity to face the pressures generated by this clash of values. Nevertheless, the older migrants also face difficulties in dealing with the new realities of Jupiter without losing their sense of who they are and their ties to their community of origin. The values of individual autonomy and the formation of a personal set of goals, which takes place outside of the traditional norms and controls of the community of origin, generate a significant degree of tension that is likely to alter many an individual’s capacity to construct notions of the future that include multiple values from each community. The most likely path to creating an ordered and stable cognitive map for Jupiter’s immigrants lies in their participation in religious and civic organizations. But even this participation can be insufficient for many immigrants. The theme that dominated the discourse of our respondents throughout our four years of research in Jupiter and Jacaltenango is that there is a permanent tension in the interpretation and reinterpretation among immigrants of the following key concepts: their community of origin and their destination community in Jupiter; their commitments to their family in Jacaltenango and their individual needs in Jupiter; their idealized past and their ambivalent present; and, finally, their sense of autonomy based in the individual acceptance of collective norms and their struggle to negotiate the normative control that comes from outside sources such as religious institutions and the family. The transnational community that exists between Jacaltenango and Jupiter brings both opportunities and liabilities for immigrants and their families. Without major structural changes in Guatemala and/or regularization of undocumented workers in the United States, the dynamics of negotiating families across transnational time and space, with all of the attendant ambiguities and tensions, is likely to continue well into the future of both Jupiter and Jacaltenango.

NOTES

. See Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, “I’m Here, but I’m There: The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood,” in Gender and U.S. Immigration: Contemporary Trends, ed. Hondagneu-Sotelo (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . Also see Norma Ojeda, “Familias transfronterizas y familias transnacionales: Algunas reflexiones,” Migraciones Internacionales  (): –. . The census undercounts Guatemalans because many Guatemalans self-identify under other categories, including Native American, white, Mayan, or other. See Michael E. Fix and Jeffrey S. Passel, “U.S. Immigration at the Beginning of the st Century: Testimony before the Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims Hearing on ‘The U.S.

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Population

and

Immigration’

Committee

on

the

Judiciary

U.S.

House

of

Representatives,” Urban Institute,  (http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=900417). . California and Arizona are among the most important other destinations for Jacaltecos. . For a more complete overview of the emerging field of transnationalism in immigration studies see Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); Luis Guarnizo Portes and Patricia Landolt, “Introduction: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field,” Ethnic and Racial Studies  (): –; Anna L. Peterson, Manuel A Vasquez, and Philip J. Williams, eds., Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, ). . See Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, ), ; Richard Wood, Faith in Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), ; Mark R. Warren, J. Phillip Thompson, and Susan Saegert, “The Role of Social Capital in Combating Poverty,” in Social Capital and Poor Communities, ed. Saegert, Thompson, and Warren, – (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, ). . See chapter  for a more complete description of this process. Also see Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser, eds., New Approaches to Migration? Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home (London and New York: Routledge University Press, ). . This concerns the procedure by which researchers and interviewers simultaneously produce the systemization of information gathered and form conclusions in a like manner. . Jocelyn Sabbagh, “What Remittances Can’t Buy: The Social Cost of Migration and Transnational Gossip on Women in Jacaltenango” (honors thesis, directed by Dr. Timothy J. Steigenga, Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University, May ), . . Hondagneu-Sotelo, “I’m Here, but I’m There,” . . Programa DECOPAZ/PNUD-UNOPS, “Informe sobre la Pobreza en Guatemala,” (Guatemala: SEGEPLAN, ). . X Censo Nacional de Población y V de Habitación (Guatemala, ). . Levels of education of those interviewed during this research were the following: . percent with a primary education; . percent without primary education; . percent with secondary education; . percent with secondary incomplete; . percent with a technical degree; . percent with some university; . percent with a completed university degree; . percent with no response. . According to the Jupiter survey,  percent of the sample (which includes both Mexicans and Guatemalans) is employed in the service sector (gardener, landscaping, domestic service);  percent, in construction,  percent, in agriculture; and  percent, in other activities (electricians, machine and equipment operators, cashiers, waiters, clerks). . The situation for day-laborers has improved significantly since this research was originally conducted. The opening of the El Sol Neighborhood Resource Center in September of  has provided a more orderly and sanitary locale for day-labor transactions as well as a significant resource for immigration, health, education, and other social services for the immigrant community. . Since the opening of the El Sol Resource Center, this sort of abuse has been significantly curbed as wage claims have been negotiated or referred to an attorney. . Beginning in September of , the Town of Jupiter put into place a non-solicitation ordinance which effectively eliminated the Center Street labor market. At the same time, Catholic Charities, Corn-Maya, and the Friends of El Sol opened a labor center

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on town property. The center now provides an orderly location for the labor market and negotiates wage claims for workers who have not been paid (along with providing ESL classes and multiple other social services). . Only . percent send more than $,, and only . percent did not respond to this question. . Taken from Dardón Sosa, “La migración internacional en el municipio Jacaltenango, Huehuetenango: Un acercamiento desde las comunidades. Estudio de Caso. Aplicación de Encuesta de Hogar” (Guatemala: Programa de Migración/ FLACSO Guatemala, ). Part of the conclusion states: “A strong communal impact exists from migration in social, cultural, and economic terms; growth without development. The real amount of the remittances that are received can be underestimated and without doubt taken in financial speculation. The longer they stay in the United States, the lower the transfer of remittances.” . Levitt, The Transnational Villagers. . We arrived at this calculation using $ as the average weekly income of Guatemalans in Jupiter. . “International Telecommunications Data” (Federal Communications Commission, December ). . Conservative estimates of the benefit generated by this income indicate that these businesses could obtain close to $ million with only the communications between the United States and Guatemala. These numbers could be expected to rise when one considers, for example, the communications that could have happened between the United States and Mexico (http://168.234.170.2/docsit/E4022003.PDF). . See Irene Palma C. Silvia and Antonio Vásquez Bianchi, “Cuando las ilusiones se dirigen al norte: Aproximación al análisis de la migración a Estados Unidos y las implicaciones de ese proceso en comunidades del altiplano occidental de Guatemala” (Guatemala: FLACSO Guatemala and University of Southern California, July ); and Antonio Vásquez Bianchi, “Factores condicionantes de la migración a Estados Unidos en comunidades rurales,” in Después de Nuestro Señor, Estados Unidos. Perspectivas de análisis del comportamiento e implicaciones de la migración en Guatemala, coordinated by Irene Palma C. Silvia et al. (Guatemala: Flacso Guatemala, ), –. . This is the case of the visit of electoral candidate Eduardo Stein to Jupiter in August . As a result of this first approach, the vice president, true to his word, returned to Jupiter after the elections. Although he was unable to attend, he sent Guatemalan foreign minister Jorge Bríz to sign the sister city agreement between Jupiter and Jacaltenango, which became effective in June . Two years later, Guatemalan president Oscar Berger visited the newly inaugurated El Sol Center and gave a speech in which he promised to utilize Jupiter as an example in his discussion with President Bush about immigration reform. . Indeed, the role of family networks is well established in the study of migration. See Monica Boyd, “Family and Personal Networks in International Migration: Recent Developments and New Agendas,” International Migration Review  (): –.

4 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Solidarities among Mexican Immigrants in Immokalee PATRICIA FORTUNY LORET DE MOLA, MIRIAN SOLÍS LIZAMA, AND PHILIP J. WILLIAMS

In this chapter we analyze the varied forms of solidarity that are constructed 

among mobile populations of peasant, mestizo, and indigenous Mexican immigrants in Immokalee, Florida. Our intention is to elucidate the spontaneous, informal, and more formal elements that these diverse groups utilize to form bonds of solidarity across national, cultural, and religious borders. We refer to the phenomena analyzed in this chapter as “solidarities” because the groups that we studied are characterized by a certain degree of cohesion that leads individuals to act in the pursuit of collective benefits and goals. As we will see, mobile populations contain many heterogeneous actors that often do not belong to the same nationality, ethnic group, or social class: therefore, such collectivities do not constitute unified groups per se, despite the importance of their internal links. We use the concept of solidarity, then, in the sense of mutual support and union among different groups whose own nature determines the specific elements they may include as well as the mutable social conditions in which they emerge and as a result of which they develop their spontaneity, fragility, permanence, and structure. In the first case, we describe mutual support networks that form spontaneously, or out of contingent circumstances, between members of two different national groups that find themselves in a social space that is alien to them. Although this case does not rely on transnational linkages in the traditional sense, it may be seen as an example of “horizontal linkages,” where immigrants from different national groups transgress political, economic, and cultural boundaries that would normally separate them. The second case concerns a mestizo sector of Immokalee’s immigrant population, made up of families from Chamácuaro, Guanajuato, who exemplify the traditional model of transnationalism that unites established immigrants to their place of origin through fiestas patronales. Finally, the third case reveals the density of social ties 80

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in a “transnational moral community” constructed by members of the Otomí ethnic group, from the state of Hidalgo, Mexico. Despite their relatively recent arrival to Immokalee, the Otomíes exhibit a higher degree of bonded social capital and solidarity than the rest of Immokalee’s Mexican immigrant community. Close observation of these three distinct cases, involving peasants, mestizos, and an indigenous group, respectively, allows us to highlight the variety of elements that come into play in the building of solidarities in a “transnational social field,” in which social subjects cross national, cultural, and religious borders. As they navigate these different cultural spaces, immigrants reconfigure and transform their social identities. On the one hand, they are victims of economic globalization because they are mobilized, together with commodities and money, at the service of capitalism. On the other, they are social actors who respond to globalization by exploiting the resources that this process itself provides, as a means of extending and reproducing their lifestyles wherever they may find themselves. Although Arjun Appadurai goes much further in affirming that “a series of social forms have emerged to contest, interrogate, and reverse” globalization (emphasis added), we do agree that mobile populations are capable of constructing and transferring knowledge and that they can move and act in ways that are independent of the actions of global capitalism and nationstates. Appadurai uses the terms “globalization from below” and “grassroots globalization” to refer to such phenomena.

How, and Among Whom Do Solidarities Emerge? Unlike the cases of Jupiter and Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach, Immokalee is both an old and new destination for Mexican immigrants. One of the cases presented here—immigrants from Chamácuaro, Guanajuato—is representative of established immigrants from traditional sending communities of Mexico. The other two cases—peasants from Chiapas and indigenous Otomíes from Hidalgo—reflect the new geography of Mexican immigration to Florida and elsewhere in the United States. Immokalee is a relatively new destination for these groups of immigrants from newly emerging migratory states in Mexico. Moreover, these newer arrivals from nontraditional sending states often face the regional prejudices of more established immigrants who view them as coming from less developed, even backward regions of Mexico. Given the exceptionally diverse ethnic, class, and regional origins of its immigrant population, Immokalee is a place rife with contradictions. The atmosphere that reigns on the streets around the center of town and to the north of the main road is filled with perils, real or imagined, that haunt those who live there. The dispersion, the diversity, and the fear of being assaulted or knifed make the residents of certain neighborhoods uneasy, especially after

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nightfall. As we will discuss in chapter , compared to Jupiter, immigrants in Immokalee generally have lower levels of social capital and are less likely to see their co-nationals as sources of support or assistance. However, such a onedimensional view would only allow us to perceive the dark side of this reality and would lead us to conceive of all immigrants as isolated, anomic individuals. In the case of Brazilian immigrants discussed in chapter , we saw that despite the absence of visible markers of community organization, Brazilians sustain a rich sociability and engage in a diverse array of interpersonal networks. Even in a place like Immokalee, loyalties emerge, festivals are celebrated, people go to church, go shopping, play soccer, struggle for their rights, communicate with their loved ones back home, fall in love, have children, send money to their families, and sometimes carry out successful collective projects (see the discussion of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in chapter ).

“Spontaneous Solidarities” between Dominicans and Chiapanecos In a place where dispersion and diversity predominate, we had to search for social spaces where we could observe the actions of immigrants who remain at the margin of churches and other organizations that constitute the most visible spaces of encounter in Immokalee. One such meeting place turned out to be Helena’s money transfer agency, as the constant flow of immigrants through her office endows it with a certain “sense” and “meaning” that go far beyond the relatively simple, utilitarian services it provides which consist of sending monetary remittances to Mexico and Guatemala and offering long-distance telephone service. This office comes to resemble a “space of sociability,” where recent immigrants who first approach it for practical reasons find that through frequent visits and social interaction their social relations become transformed into what we call “spontaneous solidarities.” In the specific case alluded to here, it is important to note the charismatic personality of the person who manages the money transfer agency: Helena is around thirty years old and arrived to Immokalee in . She was born in the province of Azua (northern Dominican Republic), in a very poor rural town called Los Indios, in the municipality of Padre Las Casas, where most people work cultivating coffee and bananas. Today, this young Dominican woman’s parents depend almost totally on the remittances their daughter sends home. She managed to finish high school in Santo Domingo before migrating to the United States for economic reasons, where she soon obtained residency. During our fieldwork in Immokalee, her agency became an extension of our project, as it was there that many of our interviews took place. Moreover, it was the place where we were able to learn about events, conflicts, and celebrations in town. We succeeded in establishing a climate of trust with immigrants there, largely due to their fondness for this young woman, many of whose clients confided

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their worries, concerns, and loneliness to her. A sympathetic listener, she offered them encouragement and a helping hand whenever she could. Helena rents a house in Immokalee, where she lives with her husband, their three-year-old son, a sister-in-law, and a cousin. In this chapter, we limit our discussion to the relations that developed among this young Dominican woman, her cousin Roger and a family clan made up of five brothers and sisters from Chiapas, examining how loyalties emerged among them. There are approximately twenty Dominicans living in the area, most of whom arrived about four years ago. Almost all of these immigrants are related and come from the same town in the Dominican Republic. Two of them own most of the local money transfer offices, where their relatives are often employed. Those who cannot find work in the agencies take jobs in other businesses around town, such as in Laundromats or in a nearby casino that is run by Seminole Indians. Most of the Dominicans have legal residence or citizenship status and none has ever worked in the agricultural fields that surround Immokalee. With respect to the immigrants from Chiapas (Chiapanecos), the first to arrive were the eldest brothers of the Rodríguez family, Octavio and Eleuterio, in late . They subsequently sent money home so that their brothers, Roberto and Dionisio, and, later, their only immigrant sister, Rosaura, could also make it to the United States. Just a year and a half ago Lidia, Roberto’s eldest daughter, a young girl of eighteen, also arrived. Rosaura lives with her husband in Immokalee, though their children are back home in Chiapas, where they live with their grandparents. Meanwhile, Eleuterio and his wife, a Guatemalan, live with their twelve-year-old twins who were born in Immokalee and speak only English. All of these immigrants, except Lidia, work picking tomatoes in the harvest season, before moving further north in the summer months to harvest fruits. Back in Chiapas they all worked as small-scale peasant farmers. The youngest brother, José, was the only male sibling who stayed behind in Chiapas. Thanks to the remittances sent by his older brothers, José was able to study to become a clinical nurse. Shortly after graduating he found a job at a health center in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. His brothers spoke with him and the rest of the family regularly by telephone. Then, for several weeks these telephone calls home became more and more frequent, as it turned out that José had begun to suffer from a mysterious ailment. Telephone calls and remittances intensified as José’s siblings in Immokalee made decisions about their brother based on the information they received about his state of health. They came to believe that José’s illness was due to witchcraft (mal de puesto), brought on by someone who envied his job as a nurse. Then, while still in Florida, they decided that José should be taken to the neighboring state of Oaxaca to be examined by a brujo (traditional healer) who was believed to have the ability to cure that particular spell or curse. They proceeded to contract the brujo’s services by phone and he soon informed them that he had performed the cure: according to his

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report, their younger brother had “expelled stones and sand from his head” and would soon be well. To pay the hospital bills and a series of treatments for José, his siblings in Florida sent more than five thousand dollars to Mexico, but that was insufficient to save the young man’s life, as he died in March . Rosaura and Octavio traveled to Mexico to attend the funeral. The hastily made arrangements for the trip involved the money transfer agency, because getting them to the airport in Miami entailed coordinating several movements. First, Rosaura’s husband drove them to the Okeechobee highway. There, Helena’s cousin Roger was awaiting them. It turned out that in that moment he was living temporarily in Miami and offered to drive them from their rendezvous point on the highway to the Miami airport, where they would then catch their flight to Mexico City. Despite the fact that there were disagreements and tensions among the Rodríguez siblings—one of them actually avoided all contact with the others, and vice-versa—they all shared the same pain of separation from the rest of their clan back home in Chiapas. During the crisis caused by José’s illness they all congregated at the money transfer office to speak with their relatives at home, to discuss the next steps they should take, to send money, and to hammer out agreements. Similar to the transnational Jacaltec families discussed in chapter , the Rodríguez family took advantage of transnational communications to overcome the constraints of time and space in making collective decisions about the fate of their loved one back in Chiapas. Because of her close relationship to the members of the family in both the United States and Mexico, Helena received messages from Chiapas that she would transmit to José’s brothers and sisters when they came to her office. Moreover, if because of some technical problem they were unable to communicate with Chiapas, she would make sure that messages got through to their relatives as soon as communication was restored. This situation allowed her to play the role of intermediary, and she was often the first to receive the latest news from both sides of the border. Despite this somewhat advantageous position, out of respect for the family Helena never voiced her skepticism concerning their evaluation of José’s illness as the result of witchcraft. Nor did she express her disagreement with their decision to hire the services of a brujo to cure the malady they called mal de puesto, even though her involvement with the aggrieved family from Chiapas led her to attend meetings outside her agency where the siblings discussed this painful matter. Months later, relations between Helena and the Chiapanecos became even closer when one of the immigrants suffered a traffic accident. She actually closed her business in order to go and help him. Similarly, the Rodríguez family offers her support when circumstances require it, either with her business or with her son or husband. Although there are numerous other money transfer agencies available where they could send money to Mexico, it goes without saying that the Rodríguez’s would never visit any other agency: they simply prefer

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to wait until their friend opens hers. In addition to their daily interactions at the office, Helena and the Chiapanecos see each other with a certain frequency in the evenings to chat or have dinner together. The women of the Rodríguez clan spend more time with Helena, as they accompany one another to go shopping, do their banking, tend to school affairs, or simply get together to chat. The friendship that unites Helena and these young women is stronger than her ties to other women from her own country that also live in Immokalee. The social networks that come to be woven in multicultural, multiethnic settings among groups with no natural links, such as those that characterize co-nationals or people who share class identities or common beliefs, are achieved precisely because individuals cross boundaries of nation, class, belief, and even gender when necessary. This case illustrates some of the conditions that allow simple interpersonal relationships to be transformed into spontaneous solidarities among immigrants from different national groups. Participation in collectivities of this nature opens the possibility of creating social capital that benefits the people involved by giving them access to collective resources such as useful information and/or knowledge that can be converted into economic capital, power, or social prestige. In the case examined above, Helena provides news of job opportunities because she interacts with such a large number of people on a daily basis. In exchange, those people bring new clients to her agency to send their remittances, purchase prepaid telephone cards, or buy some other product from among the diverse wares that she sells there. In this way, both parties benefit from their social relationship, not only by resolving problems of everyday life, but also by generating more tangible forms of capital. In the episode narrated here, one aspect that stands out is the absence of other Dominicans, except for Roger, who played only a collateral role. Much of the support that Helena receives in the town does not come from her co-nationals, but mainly from Mexican immigrants (like the Rodríguez family from Chiapas) who can be seen as dispersed or solos, and who accompany her and help her in difficult times. Such spontaneous solidarities first arise due to contingent circumstances and at critical junctures, but then become solidified in the midst of the precarious conditions in which immigrants so often find themselves. We call these relations “spontaneous solidarities” because they evolve at the margins of more formal, institutionalized networks, unlike those discussed in the two cases that follow. This case does not rely on the typical vertical linkages associated with transnationalism that link sending and receiving communities. Moreover, the solidarity between this Dominican woman and the Chiapanecos is not rooted in a common territory or shared past, reflecting the transitory nature of the alliance and the people involved. The nexus established between these immigrants from two different national groups transgresses the boundaries that at first glance would seem to

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separate them, making them tenuous or, perhaps in some cases, erasing them completely. They are brought together by the shared aspects of their lives—the social, economic, and political disadvantages of not speaking the official language. They are forced to survive on the meager wages they obtain through their daily labor, which is often insecure and exhausting. In addition, they are united by their involuntary exile that separates them from their relatives, who often end up becoming their dependents. These forms of solidarity, though temporary, enable mobile populations to confront everyday problems of survival as they respond to the conditions of the global capitalist system. On an imaginary continuum of solidarity, this case would represent the most fragile form, one that emerges in specific junctures but lacks continuity and that, therefore, contrasts strongly to the other two cases we discuss below.

The Transnational Fiesta of Santa Cruz among Mestizos from Chamácuaro Chamácuaro is located in the municipality of Acámbaro in the state of Guanajuato and has a population of some fifty-five hundred inhabitants. Since the turn of the twentieth century, this town has had one of the highest rates of migration to the United States in all of Mexico. The long history of out-migration together with the discovery of new labor markets has produced a kind of diaspora among its people throughout the United States, such that today immigrants from Chamácuaro can be found in Cicero and Chicago, Illinois; Santa Rosa, Windsor, and Hillsborough, California; Immokalee, Palm Beach, and Lehigh, Florida; Dalton, Georgia; and in other cities and towns scattered around the states of Nebraska, Ohio, Texas, and Oregon. Immigrants from Chamácuaro (Chamacuarenses) began to arrive in Immokalee in the s, constituting the first flows of Latino immigrants to the area, and are considered the “founders” of the town. Among the first to arrive were members of several interrelated extended families who had first settled in Texas but later moved to Florida, where they found work as agricultural laborers. The networks that these “pioneer” families created allowed and encouraged the migration of other townspeople and eventually led to the formation of social networks in this area of Florida. As Douglas Massey and Jorge Durand write, “Each act of migration creates social capital among people to whom the migrant is related, thereby raising the odds of their migration.” Over the years many Chamacuarenses became permanently established in Immokalee, though most continued to work in agricultural tasks (la labor). Others, however, favored by their migratory status as residents and/or U.S. citizens, obtained new employment opportunities, and some even managed to set up their own small businesses. The second generation, those born in Florida and better educated than the first, has a wider array of employment alternatives

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available to them than their parents did, and this has allowed them to take jobs in the service sector. The salient point here is that some Chamacuarenses have been able to escape, definitively, from the grueling work characteristic of the agricultural sector. Of the three immigrant groups analyzed in this chapter, it is those from Chamácuaro who have accumulated the most social capital, as they have relationships with people located across a wide social and economic spectrum. By virtue of their condition as established immigrants, they have been able to adapt, conquer, and appropriate new social spaces that emerged in the milieu which they inhabit. They also face fewer hardships than other immigrants. It is perhaps due to these historical circumstances that their need to associate among themselves has diminished markedly in comparison to the situation that more recent arrivals face. In reality, they succeeded in widening and diversifying their social networks through the inclusion of local or regional actors, such as Texans, Chicanos, Mexican Americans, and Euro-Americans, and this allowed them to escape from the exclusive bonds that united them at the beginning; though by the same token it also isolated them from the rest of the society. By interacting on a daily basis in social arenas that go beyond traditional spheres of employment, the Chamacuarenses, like other established immigrants, build close and, at times, long-lasting relationships with the local schoolteachers who teach their children or grandchildren, employees of hospitals and government agencies, professional people, and authorities of the Catholic Church. In fact, they have now attained a certain level of social status in all of these contexts. The commitment of Chamacuarenses to the local Catholic Church is an excellent illustration of their adaptation to this social milieu, because, as pointed out in chapter , it is precisely the more established immigrants who have the closest relationship to this institution, as evidenced not only by their constant attendance at Sunday mass and other rituals—like the Vía Crucis at Easter–but also by their active participation in annual events such as the precarnaval and carnaval. They contribute time and personal resources to these two church-related activities and, in , collected funds that totaled almost seventy thousand dollars. Though these Chamacuarenses have succeeded in overcoming the precarious conditions and hostile environment that they encountered initially in Immokalee, this does not mean that they have been “assimilated” into mainstream American life; rather, they conserve their traditions, language, and Mexican roots and reject some of the cultural elements of the receiving society. The informal and unstructured character of Chamacuarense community life in Immokalee is reflected in the annual collection drive they have organized for more than twenty years as a means of underwriting the costs of the celebration of the Fiesta de Santa Cruz (Feast of Holy Cross). In , Chamacuarenses

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in Immokalee collected a little over one thousand dollars to send home as a contribution to support the costs of their fiesta patronal. But this is a precarious union that rests upon the simplest and most informal level of organization: the individual entrusted with the responsibility for fund-raising simply visits the homes of paisanos from Chamácuaro, asking them to make voluntary donations to the fund that will be sent back to their hometown. There is no need to hold meetings to reach an agreement on a fixed, per-person donation, as each individual decides how much he or she can, or wishes to, contribute. This group shows a greater willingness to establish permanent solidarities in order to carry out joint activities related to organizing the fiesta patronal. However, the unstructured nature of immigrant participation in the fiesta resembles the kind of decentralized, flexible transnational religious ties that Peggy Levitt refers to as “negotiated transnational religious organization.” Most Chamacuarenses maintain close ties to their town of origin. Though some may have been living in Florida for thirty years or more, many of the members of the first and second generations still travel to Chamácuaro every year for the commemoration of their patron saint. As scholars of religion and migration have demonstrated for other Mexican localities, fiestas patronales operate as one of the social mechanisms par excellence that serve to reunite those who have departed and those who remain behind, bringing them closer together and thus reaffirming their sense of belonging. If we were to travel back in time to Chamácuaro some twenty years ago, we would witness a celebration that lasted just three days and included only one dance, but no live music. As collective remittances began to arrive, however, the fiesta was extended to nine days with dances every night accompanied by the music of several live bands. The fiesta now gets underway on April  and continues through May . It involves both religious and profane elements. Among the former we find processions, novenas, and masses, while the latter includes dances, cockfights, and bull-riding events that mark the end of the festivities. During the fiesta, the townspeople recognize and legitimize the efforts of “the absent ones” through their economic contributions, as was expressed to us by one of the organizers: “What we want is for the people to have a good time. They come from far away, so they should enjoy themselves. Attending the fiesta is really nice; it makes you feel good. Some families don’t spend money up there so that they can come; they don’t make payments and sacrifice all year long. Up there, they’re like slaves. . . . You can’t walk in the street with a beer like here, so they come here to rest, to the Santa Cruz to feel good.” For the norteños (those who live in the United States), the celebration is an opportunity to get together with friends and relatives. During the fiesta, immigrants participate in activities for collective benefit that reinforce their belonging to—and identity with—their place of origin. A local official offered the following example: “The day before yesterday we received a very good response because some childhood friends just

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arrived from California and they told me, ‘Are you selling tickets? Well, we’ll help you.’ And because they know a lot of people who come from the U.S., this is the meeting point, they say hello and we made really good sales. Today I saw them and told them ‘I need you’ and they were the first ones to buy.” The fiesta constitutes a transnational social space because it reinforces bonds and keeps immigrants coming back. It entails a multiplicity of symbols that bring the Chamacuarenses closer together, both among themselves and with their town. The intense emotive, affective, and religious experiences that appear in the narratives recounted by participants during the “extraordinary time” of the fiesta contribute, on the one hand, to the symbolic reconstruction of their territory beyond political borders and, on the other, to the desire and dream of returning. Catholicism is the central element that agglutinates and gives continuity to this encounter. Everyone participates in a kind of “popular religiosity” manifested by participating in processions, novenas, dawn serenades, rosaries, masses, and the adoration of the Holy Cross. The local priest told us that in reality his involvement in the organization of some of the events was quite limited. On the day set aside for their procession (May ), immigrants are given a space and time that the priest uses to reintegrate them into the religious community, in order to reaffirm their faith and keep them from abandoning the ranks of Catholicism in a Protestant country. For most immigrants, the fiesta is their only opportunity to keep in touch with their paisanos, as telephone calls and remittances tend to become more and more infrequent and may even lapse entirely as people establish long-term residence in el norte. Thus, the mestizos from Chamácuaro, mediated by the symbolic efficacy of their beliefs that bring them back for the fiesta patronal, reflect a more stable and enduring form of solidarity that dates back several decades and has several common elements that resemble an emergent transnational community: a shared origin, a shared history, and a shared physical/symbolic territory. These elements lead us to place them on a second level of our imaginary “continuum of solidarity.”

A “Transnational Moral Community” of Otomíes Through a young woman from Chiapas named Lorena, we met a group of Otomíes made up of her husband, Lázaro, and his brother, Miguel, both from Santa Teresa Davoxtha; another pair of brothers, Alfonso and Ambrosio, from El Mandhó, Ixmiquilpan; and Lucio from Pozuelos, who had only recently arrived from Atlanta with his wife and two small children, all of whom were living in a trailer. Lázaro was serving for a year (January –January ) as the leader of an association of hñahñus (Otomíes, in the indigenous language) that brought together some fifteen fellow hñahñus living in Immokalee, five more in Clearwater, Florida, and another thirty in Las Vegas, Nevada. This group of

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Otomíes had direct links to a small community called Santa Teresa Davoxtha, located in Cardonal, Hidalgo, Mexico, a town that, according to the  census, had only  inhabitants. This group emerged just two years ago on the initiative of the immigrants themselves, who solicited approval and recognition from the authorities in their hometown as a means of establishing their legitimacy. The local delegado (delegate) sent Lázaro Palma an official appointment that named him the “leader of the immigrants of Santa Teresa Davoxtha.” This same model of transnational organization has been reproduced in immigrant destinations of other Otomí immigrants from several localities in the state of Hidalgo, including Pozuelos, El Mandhó, and La Florida. In Las Vegas, Nevada, there is another group of immigrants from Santa Teresa Davoxtha that has its own leader, also legitimized by the “delegation” back home in Hidalgo. The principal objective of these hometown associations is to raise funds among immigrants in the United States to undertake public works projects in their towns of origin. To give one example, immigrants from Pozuelos (Ixmiquilpan, state of Hidalgo) first restored their church building and then went on build a kiosk in the central square, a track for horse races, and a bullriding ring. The funds collected are also used to underwrite fiestas patronales. The first activities carried out in Santa Teresa Davoxtha consisted of repairing the paving stones in the church atrium, constructing a building to house the delegation, and erecting stands at the local bull-riding ring. In the year , immigrants organized two fund-raising drives: in the first, each person donated $ dollars, while in the second the contribution was $ dollars. Likewise, the association supports the celebrations to honor Santa Teresita de Jesús, the town’s patron saint, which are held every year, from October  to . Remittances are used to purchase flowers, pay the charros (Mexican cowboys) for the bull-riding events, and buy the castillos (elaborate towers with fireworks). In Immokalee, Lázaro and other immigrants from Santa Teresa Davoxtha—just like their paisanos back home—celebrated their patron saint on Saturday, October . For this event, the group (teresitos) collected a total of some $, dollars; funds that were used, among other things, to buy young goats and beer. In his role as leader, Lázaro is in charge of collecting money from his fellow paisanos and assuring that it is sent back home. Every time we observed him making or receiving phone calls on his cellular telephone to or from Clearwater, Las Vegas, or to his associates in Immokalee, he invariably spoke in Otomí. From time to time, Otomíes in Clearwater travel to Immokalee for meetings held by the organization. In , immigrants from Santa Teresa Davoxtha also “reinvented” the fiesta of the Virgin of Guadalupe in their hometown, celebrated on December . This was the first time that this particular festival was held there, and it was made possible by the funds sent by immigrants. This celebration is an example of the important function that social remittances—remittances that go

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beyond simple economic transactions—fulfill in the process of reactivating traditions in the contemporary era. Otomí migration to Florida began in the s and was concentrated in Clearwater, a tourist city on the west coast of the peninsula, already populated by some twenty thousand immigrants from the state of Hidalgo who worked mostly in the service sector, though a few had managed to set up some fifty small businesses. The hñahñus in Clearwater have created a plethora of civic, social, and political organizations to unite forces and undertake a range of projects, both in Clearwater and back home in Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo. Like many other Otomíes, Lázaro first migrated to the Federal District (Mexico City), where he worked in construction. There, the Otomíes organized themselves and returned home to attend annual fiestas, so that leaving their communities did not constitute a cultural rupture but, rather, a redefinition of ethnic belonging and identity upheld by continuous returns and remittances. The forms of cooperation and communalism in which Otomíes are socialized include “cargo” systems that continue to function even though the mayordomos (those named to positions in the system) may live outside the locality or even in the United States. For example, Miguel held such a post for two consecutive years from afar while living in el norte, though he was obliged to buy the supplies needed to feed the musicians during the days of the fiesta back in his community of origin. Although recognizing the limitations related to the concept of “community” discussed in chapter , we argue that the Otomíes in Immokalee constitute an emergent “transnational moral community” whose boundaries transcend physical or territorial space. As Regina Martínez Casas and Guillermo de la Peña put it, what is important is “not the place, but belonging, and this is defined by a set of meaningful elements manifested as symbolic borders.” The Otomíes share millenarian cultural traditions and values that maintain their unity and, at the same time, their links with their place of origin. Similar to Miami Cubans discussed in chapter , they function as a “moral community.” Moreover, the Otomí community is organized on different levels. On one level we find the transnational organization that links them to Santa Teresa Davoxtha through an official appointment that defines their responsibilities to the town. On another level, however, there is a complex support network that sustains them as an ethnic group in a much broader sense. This group’s ethnic identity and bounded solidarity was even more marked in Immokalee, where, despite the immigrants’ distinct places of origin in Hidalgo (Santa Teresa Davoxtha, El Mandhó, Pozuelos, La Heredad, San Nicolás, and La Florida, among others), they all knew and supported each other and celebrated shared times and spaces in which they re-created their customs and lifestyles. Rites of passage, such as baptisms or fifteenth birthday celebrations for young girls (quinceañeras) or the commemoration of Santa Teresa, were all

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occasions to get together and celebrate in style. Most hñahñus attended such events, whether alone or with their families. There they speak their maternal language, though many—especially men—can also speak Spanish, and some even understand a few words of English. Almost all of these immigrants work as housepainters, carpenters, or in other occupations related to the construction sector. As new immigrants arrive from Mexico or from other places in the United States, they are placed in jobs by their better-connected paisanos, normally outside the agricultural sector (la labor). If for some reason one of them has to work in the fields, the group “tries to pull him” into better job markets— like construction—as soon as possible. Despite their relatively recent arrival in Immokalee—in the early s—the Otomíes have already conquered several employment niches, including housepainters, carpenters, gardeners, sub-contractors, agricultural workers, and also pinteros and small business men. Their economic advancement can be seen in the frequency with which they celebrate cultural rituals in Immokalee. On one Saturday, for example, we attended the baptism of two children where there were over one hundred guests. Though most (perhaps eighty) of them were young men of Otomí origin, there were also entire families, married women, and young unmarried girls from the same ethnic group. Macondo, the “light and sound” company hired for the event, was also owned by Otomíes. The young people who promised to serve the meal were not allowed to imbibe alcoholic drinks. The abundance displayed on this occasion showed the Otomíes’ capacity to turn social capital into economic capital and then to spend it copiously in symbolic-religious social rites that are culturally important and that contribute to strengthening mutual ties. The transnational moral community made up of Otomíes constitutes a form of solidarity rooted in “bonding” social capital, with higher density and stronger ties than that exemplified in the two previous cases. This is related to the Otomíes’ long history of confrontation with state authority, dating back to preHispanic times and continuing with the colonial and postcolonial state. The Otomíes oppose and sometimes reject the Mexican state, claiming that their communities’ economic development has been achieved without the state’s help, in part thanks to remittances from paisanos in the United States. On the one hand, while their history of exploitation and subordination produces a defensive, reactive ethnicity, it also reinforces their cohesion and autonomy as an ethnic group. However, in contrast to the Jacaltecos in Jupiter (see chapter ) who look to churches and other civic organizations to replace communal and family sources of social control, the Otomíes continue to maintain a close, perhaps even rigid, relationship with their community of origin, exemplified by their continuing loyalty to the normative system of authority in Santa Teresa Davoxtha. The confrontations with authorities that occasionally occur, far from sowing disunity, strengthen Otomí ethnicity, which is expressed in the continuity of

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such cultural values as language, the cargo system and its mayordomos, social normativity (family values, uses, and customs), traditions, worldview, and links to their territory (both physical and symbolic) that serve to identify and unite them. This group cohesion contributes to converting the social capital they generate through their networks into concrete benefits. Despite their position of social, economic, political, and cultural disadvantage due to their status as undocumented, indigenous immigrants with comparatively little migratory experience, these Otomíes have already succeeded in escaping from the lowest rung on the economic ladder of the “dependent empire” of agricultural labor. Paradoxically, it is also their ethnicity that has given them the means to overcome this situation of socioeconomic disadvantage. In comparison to the two cases discussed above, the Otomíes’ accelerated success in transforming their scarce social capital into economic resources can be explained by the greater density and intensity of their ties, including transnational ties, rooted in a positive ethnic identity.

Conclusions In the examples described above, we can perceive varying degrees of solidarity among different groups of immigrants, a phenomenon that arises from a series of factors, including legal status, ethnic origin, common beliefs, and the precarious conditions in which immigrant populations live. In this study, we have presented analyses of three cases along a continuum of solidarity: from looser, less formal groups like the peasants from Chiapas to the case of the Otomíes, characterized by denser, stronger ties of solidarity. We would now like to highlight elements that are common to all three cases, and those that serve to distinguish among them. All three examples of solidarity simultaneously take advantage of and benefit from the technological advances that foster transnational linkages. Thanks to long-distance telephone services, the fax machine, computer-mediated communication, instant monetary remittances through wire transfers, and frequent trips by legal immigrants, all three groups are able to communicate more quickly and efficiently among themselves, reinforce their transnational ties, stay informed, and exercise control, despite the fact that they are living on the other side of the U.S. border. The use of these technologies directly influences the functionality of these solidarities. The information and knowledge that flow through these circuits (auditorios) also constitute part of the social capital to which these groups have access and which can be transformed into economic or symbolic resources, such as prestige and power. The first and third cases include more recent immigrants from emerging migratory states like Chiapas and Hidalgo. The second case is different, as it centers on well-established immigrants from Guanajuato, a state with a long-standing

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migratory tradition. It is precisely the long history of such mobile populations that seems to affect the creation of networks of solidarity. Those immigrants who have been established in their destinations for more than thirty years require less support from their paisanos than more recently arrived immigrants who are still carving out spaces in their new destinations. The Chamacuarenses who arrived earlier soon attained legal status as residents or citizens, and this endowed them with greater stability and the prospect of better job opportunities. However, the case of the Otomíes shows that, though they lack the legal status of immigrants from Guanajuato, their stronger ties and networks have allowed them to escape from the kind of agricultural work in which some Chamacuarenses are still trapped. As with the case of Jacaltecos in Jupiter discussed in chapter , the ethnic identity of the Otomíes has played a fundamental role in this process by allowing them to move into labor markets and then advance through them with a certain ease and in a relatively short time, an element that is absent among the mestizos from Guanajuato. Mark Granovetter argues that the “pervasive use of strong ties by the poor and insecure is a response to economic pressures.” Instead of relying on weak ties with acquaintances, the most vulnerable immigrants are more likely to rely on strong ties with kin and close friends, or, in this case, co-ethnics, for survival. However, despite the advantages of strong ties, “the heavy concentration of social energy in strong ties has the impact of fragmenting communities of the poor into encapsulated networks with poor connections between these units.” In other words, the strong ties developed in this model of solidarity can undermine the formation of “bridging” ties that can link different groups together in broader community organizations. The Otomíes and Chamacuarenses share the common practice of popular Catholicism, characterized by fiestas patronales, that informs the transnationalism that exists within both groups; though due to their status as undocumented immigrants the former are unable to attend the celebrations in their places of origin. However, in contrast to the close relationship that exists between the Chamacuarenses and the Catholic Church in Immokalee, the Otomí community lacks formal or informal links with any religious organization. Most of the Otomíes we interviewed did not know the priests and had never entered the Catholic Church, and only a few had attended a religious baptism. Though the Chiapanecos admitted to being “nominal” Catholics, they live on the margins of their faith, as do many other immigrants who share that creed (see the discussion of the congregational life of immigrants in chapter ). Nonetheless, in their places of origin they attend mass on occasions of symbolic rituals such as baptisms, weddings, and quinceañeras. The cases analyzed here also share a strong orientation toward magicalreligious activities and practices by virtue of the fact that all three groups (peasants, mestizos, and indigenous) invest a significant proportion of their income

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in sumptuary or ritual activities. The Chiapanecos financed treatment for their brother José, spending over five thousand dollars to pay a traditional healer associated with brujería (witchcraft) rather than trusting Western medicine. The mestizos from Guanajuato, though they apparently send small quantities of money to their place of origin once a year, also make extraordinary expenditures, not only in the consumption of (ceremonial) alcoholic beverages during the fiesta, but also in the form of individual donations to the church during the ritual. If we were to add up all the donations made by the Chamacuarenses dispersed across the United States, the total amount would come to several hundred thousand Mexican pesos, sums that are used to underwrite the costs of the festival. We could say the same about the Otomíes, who, though still in the first phase of economic accumulation, not only send thousands of dollars back to Hidalgo for various religious celebrations, but also make substantial economic outlays in their communities of arrival, where they reproduce their fiestas patronales and celebrate the rites of passage of their lifecycles, as exemplified by the case of the double baptism. The cases of immigrants from Chamácuaro and Otomíes from Hidalgo both resemble emerging transnational communities that encompass shared meanings and beliefs expressed in the form of collective identity. However, one important difference between the Otomíes and the Chamacuarenses has to do with the wide social networks that are established among hñahñus living in different cities in the United States (Immokalee, Clearwater, Las Vegas). In contrast, though we can find Chamacuarenses living in more than ten cities in at least eight different U.S. states, they have no links or organizations that might unite them beyond their shared place of origin. This diaspora of Chamacuarenses finds its primary nexus precisely in the fiesta patronal, and it is there that they contribute their collective remittances to investments in projects designed to improve the town’s infrastructure or in the consumption of sacred goods. It may be that because Immokalee is a new destination for Otomíes, the absence of immigrant pathways that facilitate settlement and integration encourages Otomíes to develop transnational networks that link them with paisanos in other cities in the United States and with their communities of origin. In other words, cultivating transnational relations is part of a survival strategy for Otomíes, whereas for Chamacuarenses their participation in transnational networks in support of the fiesta is unrelated to questions of survival in the community of settlement. These findings suggest that the emergence of transnational communities has less to do with the time of arrival of immigrants than with the group’s level of social and cultural capital as manifested in ethnic solidarity. Social processes such as those analyzed in this chapter represent only some of the new combinations of old forms of solidarity that are created and re-created as responses to economic globalization, which first displaces the poor from countries in the south, where unemployment and misery prevail, and then

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pushes them toward the rich countries, where demand for cheap labor is high. These economic immigrants are forced to occupy the lowest level of the labor market, which is at once indispensable for, but disdained by, people in the United States. These spontaneous, permanent, and/or dense solidarities are thus expressions of the agency of Mexican immigrants in the face of global capitalism.

NOTES

. The sociology of solidarity refers to linkages among individuals in a group or collectivity. Solidarity becomes a quality that emerges from groups and facilitates social coordination and is a precondition of all collective, non-spontaneous action. Neil Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, eds., International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol.  (New York: Elsevier Ltd., ), ,. . We use the terms “peasant,” “mestizo,” and “indigenous” to signal the differences in the social and cultural origins of these groups. Except for the Otomíes, who define themselves as such, these social subjects identify themselves in relation to their place of origin (locality, state, nation). . In Immokalee, there are other, more institutionalized forms of solidarity, including some forty Christian churches and two civic organizations that defend the rights and working conditions of agricultural laborers. These latter two organizations, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (see chapter ) and the Asociación Campesina (Peasant Association), have relatively large memberships and maintain a clear presence in the town. Both the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Asociación Campesina have links to external organizations that support them with economic, political, and logistical resources. See Patricia Fortuny, “Jornaleros agrícolas, víctimas de agricultores y de Taco Bell. La lucha por un centavo más,” La Jornada (March , ): –; Patricia Fortuny and Philip Williams, “Religion and Social Capital among Mexican Immigrants in Southwest Florida,” Latino Studies , no.  (): –. . Unlike the traditional vertical linkages associated with transnationalism that link immigrants with their communities of origin, “horizontal linkages” refer to “linkages that immigrants of various nationalities and social conditions sustain among each other and with nonimmigrants in increasingly multicultural host societies.” Larissa Ruíz-Baía, “Rethinking Transnationalism: National Identities among Peruvian Catholics in New Jersey,” in Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas, ed. Anna Peterson, Manuel Vasquez, and Philip Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), . . As discussed in chapter , “transnational social field” refers to a “network of networks that

stretch[es]

across

the

borders

of

nation-states.”

Nina

Glick

Schiller,

“Transnational Social Fields and Imperialism: Bringing a Theory to Transnational Studies,” Anthropological Theory , no.  (): . . Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,” Public Culture , no.  (): –. . In his article, Appadurai explains that the idea of an international civil society depends on the success of these efforts at globalization from below. Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization,” . . Here, we refer to institutionalized associations such as the churches or worker organizations mentioned at the outset. In chapters  and  there is more detailed discussion of these organizations’ objectives, forms of operation, and relations with different migrants.

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. Nancy Ammerman, Congregation and Community (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ). . The term “clan” is used as a synonym of “group” (a figure of speech), to avoid repetition. . Alarcón and Miles suggest that “since  there has been a growing predominance of men who travel without family in the flow of persons who go ‘north’ to work in agriculture. In many rural towns in the U.S., they are commonly known as solos.” Rafael Alarcón and Rick Mines, “El retorno de los ‘solos.’ Migrantes mexicanos en la agricultura de los Estados Unidos,” in Migración internacional e identidades cambiantes, ed. María Eugenia Anguiano Téllez and Miguel J. Hernández Madrid, (Zamora, México: El Colegio de Michoacán-El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, ), –. . Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization.” . Douglas Massey and Jorge Durand, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, ), . . The legal status attained by the Chamacuarenses over the years establishes a marked class differentiation between them and more recent migrants; one expressed when they refer to their “high” social position in contrast to the precarious situation of “other” migrants. . Some members of the second generation have joined the army, while others have gone on to study at university. . During the pre-carnaval, the faithful (mostly established immigrants like the Chamacuarenses) prepare and serve lunch. They donate the ingredients and their time and the meal is sold at a per-plate price. The money they collect is used to set up food stands and mechanical rides during the three nights of carnaval. Immigrants in Immokalee use the word “carnaval” to refer to the fair that is set up around the Catholic Church and includes food stands and rides. . Assimilation is one pattern of adaptation characteristic of immigrants, but by no means the only one. See Richard Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ). . As one established migrant put it to his son who was born in the United States: “you’ve got a nopal on your forehead but you’re speaking English.” . In April , some forty Chamacuarenses who live in Immokalee traveled together from Mexico City to Chamácuaro. . Peggy Levitt, “You Know, Abraham Was Really the First Immigrant: Religion and Transnational Migration,” International Immigration Review  (): –. . According to a  survey of the Mexican Migration Project, of thirty Mexican towns, migrants from twenty-six had strong links with the place of origin, marked by their massive return for annual fiestas. Jorge Durand and Douglas S. Massey, Clandestinos. Migración México-Estados Unidos en los albores del siglo XXI (México: Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas-Miguel Ángel Porrúa, ). See also Víctor Espinosa, “El día del emigrante y el retorno del purgatorio: Iglesia, migración a los Estados Unidos y cambio sociocultural en un pueblo de los Altos de Jalisco,” Estudios Sociológicos  (): –; Mónica Gendreau and Gilberto Giménez, “La migración internacional desde una perspectiva sociocultural: Estudio en comunidades tradicionales del centro de México,” Migraciones Internacionales  (): –; Luis Rodolfo Morán, “Representaciones religiosas de los mexicanos exiliados,” Estudios Jaliscienses  (): –; Olga Odgers, “La práctica religiosa entre los mexicanos residentes en el condado de San Diego,” in Migración Internacional e identidades cambiante, ed. Maria Eugenia Anguiano and Miguel J. Hernández Madrid, – (Zamora, México: El

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Colegio de Michoacán-El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, ); and Javier Serrano, “La dimensión cultural de las remesas: Los tapalpenses y su comunidad transnacional” (MA thesis in Social Anthropology, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social-Occidente, ). . For example, see Patricia Fortuny, “The Santa Cena of el Luz Del Mundo Church: A Case of Contemporary Transnationalism,” in Religion across Borders: Transnational Immigrant Networks, ed. Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, – (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, ); Nina Glick Schiller, “Transmigrants and Nation-States: Something Old and Something New in the U.S. Immigrant Experience,” in The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, ed. C. Hirschman, P. Kasinitz, and J. De Wind, – (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, ); Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); and Bryan R Roberts, Reanne Frank, and Fernando Lozano-Ascencio, “Transnational Migrant Communities and Mexican Migration to the U.S.,” Ethnic and Racial Studies , no.  (): –. . This refers to those religious experiences that believers make their own, characterized by a certain separation from, and independence of, the faithful in relation to the formal hierarchy and institutional theology. Thomas A. Kselman, “Ambivalence and Assumption in the Concept of Popular Religion,” in Religion and Political Conflict in Latin America, ed. Daniel H. Levine, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, ). . Thomas Faist, “Transnationalization in International Migration: Implications for the Study of Citizenship and Culture,” Ethnic and Racial Studies , no.  (): –. . For background on Mexican hometown associations, see Víctor Espinoza, El dilema del retorno: Migración, género y pertenencia en un contexto transnacional (Zamora, México: El Colegio de Michoacán, ); Luin Goldring, “The Mexican State and Transmigrant Organizations: Negotiating the Boundaries of Membership and Participation,” Latin American Research Review , no.  (): –; Robert Smith, “Transnational Localities: Community, Technology, and Politics of Membership within the Context of Mexico and U.S. Migration,” in Transnationalism from Below, ed. Michael P. Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, – (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, ); and Carol Zabin and Luis Escala Rabadan, Mexican Hometown Associations and Mexican Political Empowerment in Los Angeles (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute, ). . One person in Hidalgo is in charge of receiving and administering these funds. Lázaro sends a list with the names of those who made donations. In , the townsfolk sent a video of the Santa Teresa festival. . Peggy Levitt, Transnational Villagers. . Ella Schmidt and María Crummett, “Heritage Re-created: Hidalguenses in the United States and Mexico,” in Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United States, ed. Jonathan Fox and Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, – (La Jolla, CA: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies/Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, ). . Regina Martínez Casas and Guillermo de la Peña, “Migrantes y comunidades morales: Resignificación, etnicidad y redes sociales en Guadalajara,” in Ciudad, pueblos indígenas y etnicidad, ed. Pablo Yanes et al. (México, D.F.: Universidad de la Ciudad de México, ), . . For a discussion of the moral community among Miami Cubans, see Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick, City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). . Ambrosio and Miguel studied English for three months. Their main purpose was to try to improve their wages.

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. Pinteros are individuals who own some means of transportation (truck, or troca) in which they carry agricultural laborers to pick tomatoes, called pinto, so named because they have begun to ripen and must be picked for sale in local markets. . According to Portes and Rumbaut, “reactive ethnicity is the product of confrontation with an adverse native mainstream and the rise of defensive identities and solidarities to counter it.” Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . . In November , the traditional authorities in Hidalgo ordered that Cirilo return home for a year to work as a policeman. In Immokalee, his paisanos were in a quandary, as they felt it was inconvenient for him to return at that time. Upon learning of Cirilo’s refusal to occupy the post, the town’s authorities imposed a , peso fine that would be used to pay someone to take his place. The association began to collect funds so that Cirilo would not have to return or lose certain rights back home. . Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies. . Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,” Sociological Theory  (): . . Ibid. . Faist, “Transnationalization,” . . Estimates indicate that there are currently some  to  million people in the world who are classified as economic immigrants, that is, individuals who move from nations in the south to northern countries in search of employment opportunities and better wages.

PA RT T WO !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Collective Mobilization and Empowerment

5 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Transnationalism and Collective Action among Guatemalan and Mexican Immigrants in Two Florida Communities TIMOTHY J. STEIGENGA AND PHILIP J. WILLIAMS

We all came together in  in the struggle to improve our immigration situation. We organized first in Florida and later at the national level. We managed to halt the massive detentions and deportations that were taking place. The United States finally understood that there are Guatemalans here in the country. It was a large movement. . . . The Mayans are calm people, but they take action when they have to. —Guatemalan Mayan community leader interviewed in South Florida

In his examination of the labor struggle waged by Mayan immigrants in a Morganton, North Carolina, poultry plant, historian Leon Fink describes both a juxtaposition and a collision between the forces of globalization and community. As Fink explains, “In ways that recall their nineteenth century immigrant predecessors, the émigré Mayan workers ‘use’ community to at once defend themselves against employer exploitation and to advance the interests of their friends and families across international borders.” A similar struggle is currently playing out across the United States in non-conventional sites of immigrant settlement, stirring public debate in many local areas and sending waves of repercussions back across borders to communities of origin. When do immigrants mobilize to pursue their collective interests and what tools do they have at their disposal to achieve their goals? Which contextual factors are likely to make immigrant mobilization more or less successful? What are the implications of various forms of mobilization? These are some of the most important questions facing social scientists studying migration and advocates working to promote immigrant rights. 103

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T. STEIGENGA AND P. WILLIAMS

In this chapter we attempt to provide a partial answer to these questions by comparing the very different cases of Mexican and Guatemalan immigrant community organization, transnationalism, and collective action in Jupiter and Immokalee, Florida. We explore the hypothesis that in Jupiter higher levels of social capital and cultural/ethic homogeneity among transmigrants, combined with low levels of social/cultural acceptance, facilitate greater reactive ethnicity. Reactive ethnicity, in turn, provides the basis for greater collective solidarity and political mobilization in defense of ethnic group interests. Alejandro Portes has argued that reactive ethnicity also provides a strong foundation for extensive and intensive transnational activities. As Portes explains, “there is no recourse but to draw a protective boundary around the group, identifying it with traditions and interests rooted in the home country and separating it symbolically and, at times, physically from the host society.” Ethnographic data from the two communities clearly suggests that Jupiter’s immigrant population has more institutionalized group-level transnational connections than does Immokalee’s. Unlike the case of Jupiter, our research in Immokalee suggests that Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants experience lower levels of social capital and cultural/ethnic heterogeneity and extreme economic deprivation. We hypothesize that this context provides little grounds for reactive ethnicity and thus presents obstacles to ethnic-based collective solidarity and mobilization. When mobilization does occur in the context of Immokalee, it is more likely to be multi-ethnic and class based and focused on economic issues. Given the lower levels of reactive ethnicity in Immokalee, we also expect fewer and less formalized group transnational activities than in the Jupiter case. We begin with a discussion of the findings from our survey on social capital, transnationalism, and collective action. The next section presents comparative insights on transnationalism and collective action gleaned from our ethnographic research and qualitative interviews in Jupiter and Immokalee. We conclude with a discussion of the role of reactive ethnicity in immigrant communities, outlining the advantages and disadvantages in terms of collective action.

Comparing Jupiter and Immokalee As noted in the introduction to the volume, Jupiter and Immokalee present us with a study in contrasts. Jupiter is a relatively small and extremely wealthy coastal community of approximately fifty thousand on the northern edge of Palm Beach County. The Latin American immigrant community makes up a bit more than  percent of the total population of Jupiter and is primarily made up of Mayans from southern Mexico and Guatemala. Immokalee, by contrast, is a majority Latino agricultural community in southwestern Florida’s agricultural belt, located near the everglades in Collier County. Immokalee’s population is more than  percent Hispanic, with a total population that rises to nearly

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105

thirty thousand during harvest season and then falls again to nearly half that figure as farmworkers move north along with the harvest. Immokalee’s immigrants are primarily from rural communities and, above all, indigenous Mexican communities in Oaxaca, Chiapas, Hidalgo, Guerrero, and Veracruz. Between January and March of , we conducted survey research in both Jupiter and Immokalee to generate comparative data and gain further insights into the themes and hypotheses outlined above. In this section, we provide a brief introduction to our findings, highlighting the background variables that distinguish the immigrant population in each community, migration trajectories, social capital and discrimination (as preconditions for reactive ethnicity), collective action, and measures of transnationalism.

Demographic and Background Information When comparing socioeconomic variables between Jupiter and Immokalee, the biggest difference is in income. The mean score for weekly income in Jupiter is $ per week while the mean for Immokalee was only $. This is not surprising, as the biggest employment category for Immokalee was “agricultural worker,” with over  percent of all respondents in this group. In contrast, less than  percent of the Jupiter sample works in agriculture. The largest employment category in Jupiter was domestic and other personal services (including gardening and landscaping) with nearly  percent of the sample. Nearly  percent of the Jupiter sample reported working either as skilled or unskilled labor for construction. Thus the wage differences in the two communities are clearly attributable to the very different employment opportunities in the two areas, with migrant farmworkers primarily concentrated in Immokalee. The different labor and employment contexts in Jupiter and Immokalee also contribute to differences in terms of the permanency of the population. When asked if they had lived in other U.S. states, . percent of Immokalee respondents said that they had, while only . percent of Jupiter respondents have lived elsewhere in the United States. In Immokalee, . percent reported frequently traveling to other states while only . percent of the Jupiter sample reported frequent traveling. The major finding in terms of educational level is that  percent of the entire sample has an elementary education or less, with no significant differences between the Immokalee and Jupiter samples. As we knew from our interviews and community mapping, a large portion of the Jupiter population is from the same geographic area. In Jupiter, . percent of the sample is from the Guatemalan department of Huehuetenango. The second largest concentration is from Chiapas, Mexico, with . percent. The remainder of the Jupiter sample is spread between Guatemalan departments and Mexican states, with the next largest concentration from the Mexican state of Michoacán, with . percent. Immokalee’s population is significantly more geographically

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T. STEIGENGA AND P. WILLIAMS

diverse, with the largest concentrations from Oaxaca (. percent) and Chiapas (. percent), Mexico. The next largest concentrations come from Guanajuato, Mexico ( percent), and Huehuetenango, Guatemala (. percent), with the remainder primarily spread throughout the other Mexican states.

Migration Trajectories and Helping Co-nationals Data on how and why respondents came to the United States illustrate some of the key differences between the immigrant populations in Jupiter and Immokalee. In the Jupiter sample, . percent reported that they had paid someone to bring them to their present location. In Immokalee, the figure was only . percent. Here we see what appears to be a more institutionalized network in the case of Jupiter. Since links to coyotes generally begin in the community of origin, we would expect that a population that comes from a more concentrated geographical area would report a higher use of these services than those from more geographically disperse sending communities. Data on why residents come to Jupiter provide further evidence for these more institutionalized transnational connections. In table ., we see that significantly more Jupiter residents came to that city for family reunification reasons (. percent) than did residents of Immokalee (only . percent). Nearly  percent of Jupiter respondents reported that they came due to contacts or friends, while less than  percent reported this reason in Immokalee (see table .). When asked to provide yes or no answers to a series of reasons why they might have come to the United States, Jupiter respondents continued to report family reunification, study, work, and a better life for their children at higher levels than Immokalee respondents (see table .). Many of the earliest immigrants TABLE 5.1

Reasons for Coming to Jupiter/Immokalee Jupiter Why did you come to this city?

Immokalee

%

n

%

n

19.4

26

52.0

77

6.0

8

4.7

7

Family reunification

50.7

68

33.1

49

Contacts, friends

14.9

20

4.7

7

Weather, quality of life, personal choice

5.2

7

3.4

5

Guatemalan or Mexican community

2.2

3

1.4

2

Other

1.5

2

0.7

1

Job, work, salary, study Coyote brought me here

TRANSNATIONALISM AND COLLECTIVE ACTION

107

to arrive in Jupiter came during Guatemala’s civil war, leading to a higher affirmative response on political repression in the Jupiter sample as well. We also asked respondents to rate how often people in their city helped their co-nationals. As is clear from table ., nearly twice as many Jupiter residents believed that residents helped their co-nationals a lot. In Immokalee, nearly  percent of those interviewed believed that residents helped their co-nationals “not at all.” These figures begin to fill in the key contrasts between Jupiter and Immokalee. Jupiter has a more geographically and ethnically homogenous immigrant population, with higher incomes, less mobility, more institutionalized immigration networks, and greater family connections. Jupiter residents are also more likely to believe that mutual assistance is available from their co-nationals.

TABLE 5.2

Reasons for Coming to the United States Jupiter Why did you come to the United States?

Immokalee

% yes

n

% yes

n

Family reunification

41.9

65

24.3

36

Study

30.3

47

8.8

13

Work

82.6

128

68.9

102

Better life for children

65.8

102

51.4

76

Political repression

12.9

20

4.1

6

TABLE 5.3

Co-national Solidarity Jupiter Do you think that people here help their co-nationals (paisanos)?

%

Immokalee

n

%

n

Not at all

11.6

18

19.7

29

A little

27.7

43

34.7

51

Some

26.5

41

29.3

43

A lot

26.5

41

13.6

20

7.7

12

2.7

4

No response

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T. STEIGENGA AND P. WILLIAMS

In Immokalee, by contrast, the immigrant population is more geographically and ethnically diverse, with lower incomes, more mobility, and less family reunification. Immokalee residents are less likely to see their co-nationals as sources of support or assistance.

Social Capital and Perceived Discrimination So how do these differences translate into social capital and the other catalysts for reactive ethnicity? In order to get a more direct measure of social capital, we asked respondents about their number of friends before and after arriving in their current location. The disparity in terms of this measure of social capital was striking. The mean score for number of friends (living in the same city) in Immokalee was only ., while the mean score in Jupiter was .. When asked how many of these friends they knew prior to coming to the United States, the mean scores were . for Immokalee and . for Jupiter. Clearly, the Jupiter residents have a larger existing circle of friends as well as a greater transnational network of friends. The higher levels of social capital evident among the Jupiter Maya are accompanied by some more negative aspects of living among an affluent, largely Anglo population. When asked, “What is the worst part of living in this city,” . percent of Jupiter residents cited culture and communication barriers, while only . percent of Immokalee residents cited these problems. In Immokalee, . percent cited material issues such as jobs, bills, and housing as the worst part of living in that city. The data on perceived discrimination are even more revealing. When asked how often they felt discriminated against, . percent of Immokalee respondents said never or almost never. Only . percent of Jupiter residents gave those responses (see table .).

TABLE 5.4

Perceptions of Discrimination Jupiter Have you ever felt discriminated against in the United States?

Immokalee

%

n

%

n

Never/almost never

51.0

79

62.3

91

Once in a while

36.8

57

28.1

41

Frequently

11.6

18

9.6

14

0.6

1

No response

0

0

TRANSNATIONALISM AND COLLECTIVE ACTION

109

When asked who discriminates against them the most, . percent of Jupiter respondents specified Anglo-Americans, while only . percent of Immokalee residents did so. In Immokalee, respondents perceived that they were discriminated against by blacks (. percent), Chicanos (. percent), and other Hispanics (. percent) at a much higher rate than in Jupiter (. percent,  percent, and . percent, respectively). As Mexican and Guatemalan migrants constitute an overwhelming majority of Immokalee’s population, societal reception of migrants tends to be more neutral than in Jupiter, in the sense that the minority Anglo population accepts the presence of migrant farmworkers as a necessary feature of the community and its principal economic activities. In Jupiter, by contrast, the majority Anglo population has reacted to the presence of Mayan immigrants with some alarm. In , a group of Jupiter residents formed a nonprofit called Jupiter Neighbors against Illegal Labor (JNAIL) with the help of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The group staged a series of protests against the town’s planned labor center. Since the center began operations in , it has been targeted by two further protest groups (from outside of the town) and a local candidate for town council.

Associational Participation and Collective Action Given our findings on discrimination and social capital, we would expect that associational participation and activities would be greater in the context of Jupiter than in Immokalee. To some degree, the data substantiate this expectation. Jupiter residents do tend to participate in religious organizations more frequently than Immokalee residents (see table .). While . percent of Immokalee respondents said that they never or almost never participated in a religious organization, only . percent of Jupiter residents reported such infrequent participation. More than twice as many Jupiter residents reported very frequent participation in religious organizations (see table .). Given that

TABLE 5.5

Participation in Religious Organizations Jupiter How often do you participate in a religious organization?

Immokalee

%

n

%

n

Never/almost never

52.5

81

71.3

102

Once in a while

24.0

37

18.2

26

Frequently/very frequently

23.3

36

10.5

15

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churches are the primary type of voluntary organization open and available to recent immigrants, religious participation provides a good proxy for associational participation in general. When asked how often they teamed up with neighbors to improve something in their community, Jupiter residents also answered that they did so more frequently than Immokalee residents. On a scale from never to very frequently, only . percent of Immokalee respondents reported that they teamed up with neighbors once in a while, frequently, or very frequently. In Jupiter, however, participation was much higher, with . percent reporting that they teamed up once in a while, frequently, or very frequently. Not surprisingly, we found that rates of religious participation were also significantly correlated with teaming up with neighbors. While religious affiliation had no effect on such participation, the frequency of participation in a religious organization is significantly correlated with the frequency of teaming up with neighbors to improve the community. In sum, the populations of Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants in Jupiter experience the social and economic conditions necessary to produce reactive ethnicity at higher rates than the Mexican and Guatemalan populations in Immokalee. The survey results confirm higher levels of social capital and perceived discrimination in the Jupiter case. Higher associational participation, collective action, more institutionalized family and friend networks, and greater stability and income also characterize the Jupiter case, confirming the links between reactive ethnicity and collective action. We now turn to a brief comparison of transnational processes and connections in the two communities.

Comparing Measures of Transnationalism As Alejandro Portes, Peggy Levitt, and Sarah Mahler have argued, the concept of “transnational social fields” spanning host and receiving countries provides a useful tool for understanding elements of transnationalism among immigrant communities. Individuals within these communities actively move between sending and receiving countries or use other means to maintain active lives in their new home and their country of origin. Many of these connections relate to religious and cultural institutions and practices. For the most part, the standard measures of individual transnationalism in our surveys did not vary greatly between Immokalee and Jupiter. In other words, individual respondents in Jupiter were no more likely than those in Immokalee to call home or send money home to their families. However, immigrants living in Jupiter were more likely to attend events related to their country of origin (see table .). This finding is important because it further demonstrates the greater institutionalization of transnational linkages in Jupiter. While the number of individual financial and communication transactions is just as high in Immokalee, organized group participation in transnational events (fiestas or other events) is greater in Jupiter.

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TABLE 5.6

Participation in Guatemalan/Mexican Events Jupiter How often do you attend Guatemalan/ Mexican events organized by people who came specifically for that?

Immokalee

%

n

%

n

Never/almost never

63.8

99

77.6

114

Once in a while

23.2

36

15.0

22

Frequently/very frequently

11.6

18

7.5

11

1.3

2

No response

0

0

TABLE 5.7

Receive News from Guatemala/Mexico Jupiter How often do you get news from Guatemala/Mexico from friends?

Immokalee

%

n

%

n

Never/almost never

24.6

38

38.7

57

Once in a while

51.3

79

46.9

69

Frequently/very frequently

22.7

35

14.3

21

1.3

2

0

0

No response

In table . we see that Jupiter residents get their news from home more frequently from friends than do Immokalee residents. Given the higher numbers of friends found in the Jupiter sample, this finding is expected. Again, we find evidence for a stronger network of transnational ties in the Jupiter case, this time through the transnational “grapevine.” Tables ., ., and . present data on transnational media. Here the findings suggest that Immokalee has a greater presence of Mexican and Guatemalan media. This finding can be explained by the fact that the larger Guatemalan and Mexican community in Immokalee provides a larger target for Spanish-based media, leading to greater readership and viewing. Multiple generations of immigrants in Immokalee provide a long-standing audience for newspapers, radio transmissions, and television channels from the home country. In Jupiter,

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TABLE 5.8

Read Newspapers from Guatemala/Mexico Jupiter How often do you read newspapers from your home country?

Immokalee

%

n

%

n

Never/almost never

87.1

Once in a while

10.3

135

70.3

104

16

23.0

34

Frequently/very frequently

1.9

3

6.1

9

No response

0.6

1

0.7

1

TABLE 5.9

Watch Guatemalan/Mexican Television Jupiter How often do you watch Guatemalan/ Mexican television?

Immokalee

%

n

%

n

Never/almost never

59.4

92

25.1

37

Once in a while

15.5

24

19.7

29

Frequently/very frequently

24.5

38

55.1

81

0.6

1

0

0

No response

TABLE 5.10

Receive Home Country Information from Radio Jupiter How often do you hear information from Guatemala/Mexico on the radio?

Immokalee

%

n

%

n

Never/almost never

77.3

119

54.7

81

Once in a while

13.6

21

29.1

43

Frequently/very frequently

7.1

11

16.2

24

No response

1.9

3

0

0

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by contrast, there are fewer Spanish-language media outlets, and interactive radio transmissions from Guatemala only began in . The survey results suggest that differences in transnationalism are primarily evident at the level of organized group participation in transnational events, while the degree of individual transnational transactions does not differ greatly between communities. The overall picture that emerges fits closely with our analysis of the conditions for reactive ethnicity in the Jupiter case. As Alejandro Portes and Eric Popkin have elaborated in the cases of Salvadorans and Kanjobal Mayans in Los Angeles, discrimination combined with strong ethnic networks can give rise to greater transnational organization. The interaction between these variables is mutually reinforcing, as transnational networks, in turn, serve as resources for mobilization and collective action. Our three years of in-depth ethnographic research in the two communities provides ample evidence to fill in the snapshot of the relationship between transnationalism and collective action that emerges from the survey results.

Transnationalism and Collective Action in Jupiter In the case of Jupiter, our qualitative research revealed important connections between transnationalism, identity, and collective action in the immigrant community. The celebration of fiestas, organization of soccer tournaments, collection of funds to return the dead to Jacaltenango, presence of the marimba at community gatherings, and transmission of information (community news, videos of celebrations, and fireworks for celebrations) all serve to reinforce the connections between the hometown and the present location. In the process, the foundation, networks, and institutions necessary for collective action among the predominantly Jacaltec Maya community in Jupiter have emerged. A brief description of the events and organization surrounding the annual Fiesta Maya in Jupiter serve to illustrate this process. The fiesta was first celebrated in , in the recently constructed town center of Jupiter’s largest planned community, Abacoa. Initially conceived as a parallel celebration of La Fiesta de la Virgen de Candelaria, the most important fiesta of the year in Jacaltenango, the fiesta has grown in size and importance since its inception. Each year, members of the Jacaltec community form sets of commissions, each responsible for different elements of the festival. The groups meet weekly in the months leading up to the festival to prepare for the Mass, procession, food, publicity, and other aspects of the celebration. Students and faculty from Florida Atlantic University’s Wilkes Honors College also attend these organizational meetings and participate in planning for the festival. The first year, the festival drew more than seven hundred community residents, primarily Guatemalan Mayans, to the new planned community of Abacoa for a day of cultural exchange, celebration, music, sports, and food. In the following

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years, the festival has grown in size (drawing nearly fifteen hundred participants each year) and has expanded to include participating music and dance groups from Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and Chile. The results of the festival continue to reverberate within the Guatemalan community and in the larger Jupiter community. The initial organizers of the fiesta continued to meet and eventually filed for nonprofit status under the name of a previously active group, Corn-Maya Inc. The nonprofit has grown significantly since , garnering grant support from the United Way, the Community Foundation, and multiple private donors. Representatives of Corn-Maya successfully lobbied on behalf of Jupiter’s immigrant community, built a strong coalition with local grassroots political and religious groups, and now collaborate with town authorities, Catholic Charities, and the Friends of El Sol to operate the El Sol Neighborhood Resource Center, a multi-service center that has addressed day-labor issues in the town while also providing key educational and other resources to the immigrant community. Since , Corn-Maya’s office has served as an unofficial employment office, a hurricane relief center, a community care closet, and a clearinghouse for immigration, legal, counseling, health, and other services to the immigrant community. In August , Corn-Maya collaborated with the local Catholic church (St. Peter’s) to sponsor a sister city agreement between Jupiter and Jacaltenango. The agreement was signed by the mayors of the two cities and the Guatemalan foreign minister, Jorge Briz. In February , Corn-Maya hosted a visit by Guatemalan president Oscar Berger to the El Sol Center in Jupiter. Berger praised the center’s work and promised to raise it as an example in his subsequent meetings with President George W. Bush. Corn-Maya has also played a key role in sponsoring soccer tournaments for Guatemalan and Mexican teams on Sundays. Teams are organized around the sending communities, each with its own reina, who gives a speech prior to the beginning of the tournament. Soccer plays a crucial role for the Mayan community as it is the primary social event of the week and serves as the location for the dissemination of community information. The finals of each tournament are broadcast live via cell phone to a radio station in Jacaltenango. The planning, organizing, and celebration of the fiesta provide Jupiter’s immigrant community with both a sense of collective identity and an organizational basis for further mobilization. The frequent experience of discrimination and social exclusion is superseded, at least for a day; as the community comes together to proudly display their traditions in the newly minted Abacoa development. The process of organizing, though frequently stressful, leads to a sense of mutual accomplishment and solidarity among the participants once all of the complicated details required to make the fiesta work are completed. As outlined in chapter , this solidarity among Jacaltecos is rooted not just in the fiesta, but also in shared images of home, shared practices, shared language,

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and a shared sending community. When any Jacalteco dies in the United States, an informal group raises funds to return the body to be buried in Jacaltenango. When a new immigrant arrives from Jacaltenango he/she may be offered a lowinterest (or no-interest) loan to pay off the higher-interest charges associated with the journey from Guatemala. When the soccer tournaments are organized, the teams represent the various physical locations surrounding Jacaltenango. When the fiesta is celebrated in Abacoa, it is organized, as much as possible, in direct parallel with the fiesta in Guatemala. The elements of solidarity and self-help that have emerged among the Jupiter Maya have also translated into public action. Organizing for the festival morphed into organizing to reinvigorate the nonprofit Corn-Maya. Representatives of Corn-Maya have met frequently with Jupiter’s political authorities, sought funding for community services, participated in community events, sponsored the sister city agreement and visits from Guatemalan dignitaries, and worked to coordinate the various civic and religious groups related to the immigrant community. The members of Corn-Maya also played a leading role in demanding that the Catholic Diocese address the fact that the church located closest to the Guatemalan community in Jupiter did not have any mission to the immigrant community. A  letter addressed to the new bishop reads in part: “As a community of faith with very traditional and strong Catholic values, we wanted to worship, practice, and share them in a congregation that can receive us as equals. Nevertheless, you did not include us in the convocation  years ago and you have excluded us to this very day. . . . [Y]ou are one of us, our brother in Christ who doesn’t know it, and we love our wayward brother. As you go to your powerful position the prayer meetings will ask that God be with you. Don’t be mad at us for reminding you that there is no Holy Communion when people are excluded.” In , the diocese instituted Spanish services at the Catholic Church in Jupiter. Since that time, St. Peter’s has played a key role in advocating for the immigrant community in Jupiter. The most notable achievement that has emerged from the growth of CornMaya is the El Sol Neighborhood Resource Center. In , after two years of intense lobbying, the Jupiter Town Council placed two hundred thousand dollars in the five-year Community Investment Program (CIP) to fund a labor center in the town. In , the town council voted to allow Corn-Maya and Catholic Charities to use a town building to establish a neighborhood resource center. Corn-Maya, the Friends of El Sol, and Catholic Charities opened the center in September . The center is now run exclusively by El Sol and Corn-Maya. In short, it appears as though the organizing and collective action necessary to carry out the public celebration of the fiesta has acted both as a unifying force and an impetus to public action for the Jacaltec community and their fellow immigrants in Jupiter. The many transnational elements of the celebration

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of the fiesta, along with other imagined and real conceptions of home (such as sending back the dead and organizing the soccer leagues), are linked with increased activism and civic engagement among the Jacaltec community in Jupiter. At the same time, the celebration of the fiesta helped to forge links between the immigrant community, the university, and representatives of the town. These connections began to bring institutional support for the immigrants as well as opportunities for internships and service learning for students and volunteer opportunities at El Sol for interested community members. A process that began with what Robert Putnam has called “bonding” social capital—celebrating a local town’s festival—transformed into a process of “bridging” social capital: bringing multiple groups and individuals together for the common purpose of creating a resource center that addresses local community needs related to the growing immigrant community.

Transnationalism and Collective Action in Immokalee In the case of Immokalee, low levels of social capital and cultural/ethnic heterogeneity and extreme economic deprivation present significant obstacles to constituting and reproducing transnational ties. Following Luis Guarnizo and Michael Smith, “the image of transnational migrants as deterritorialized, free-floating people represented by the now popular adage ‘neither here nor there’ deserves closer scrutiny.” In Immokalee, both our survey research and qualitative interviews provide plenty of evidence of “migrant-led transnationalism” or “transnationalism from below,” such as sending remittances, videos, and letters, maintaining kinship networks across borders, and participating in return migration. However, with the exception of a group of Otomíes from Hidalgo (see below), more institutionalized forms of transnationalism (hometown associations and collective community projects) are largely absent in the Immokalee case. This is also true for religious institutions in Immokalee; although some maintain translocal relations with churches in nearby communities, we uncovered few examples of more institutionalized networks with churches in migrants’ communities of origin. More typical were informal, decentralized cross-border initiatives, such as the pastor of the local Assembly of God church who maintains close ties with sister congregations in Mexico. The pastor regularly visits and supports a church in Hidalgo founded by a former member of the Bethel Assembly of God church, and individual church members have participated in evangelistic campaigns in Veracruz. The church in Immokalee also hosts frequent visits by preachers from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. Levitt refers to these examples of decentralized, flexible transnational religious ties as “negotiated transnational religious organization.” Another example of flexible, decentralized transnational ties is the case of migrants from Chamácuaro, Guanajuato, who return each year in May

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for the Fiesta de Santa Cruz. As described in chapter , migrants from Chamácuaro first began arriving in Immokalee during the s and count themselves as among the “pioneers” of the Mexican presence in town. Despite lacking a formal organizational structure, each year migrants from Chamácuaro throughout the United States collect money to support the fiesta back home. In May , migrants in Immokalee contributed approximately one thousand dollars to the fiesta, and about forty people traveled together to Mexico to participate in the annual festivities. They were joined in Chamácuaro by a few thousand migrants from all over the United States. The establishment of translocal networks between Chamácuaro and diverse localities in the United States, the systematic return of migrants, and the economic contributions from migrants in the United States have transformed the celebration into a transnational fiesta.

The Otomíes as the Exception As demonstrated in the Jupiter case, for immigrants of limited means, social capital rooted in ethnic networks can provide key resources in confronting obstacles to socioeconomic advancement. In Immokalee, a small group of Otomíes from the state of Hidalgo appear to be on a similar trajectory as the Jacaltec Maya in Jupiter. As discussed in chapter , after less than a year, the Otomíes were able to multiply their social networks and use them to their economic advantage. Most moved out of agricultural labor and found employment in the construction industry in nearby Naples. New Otomí migrants arriving from Hidalgo are steered into construction work, unlike most Mexican migrant workers. Why is it that indigenous Otomíes, lacking economic means, appear to be more successful in accumulating social capital than other recent migrant workers in Immokalee? The density of ties, including transnational ties, grounded in a reactive ethnic identity seems to be crucial. Although Mexican and Guatemala migrants face a less hostile reception in Immokalee, as compared to Jupiter, there is some hostility on the part of more established immigrants (mostly from traditional migrant sending states in western Mexico) toward recent migrants from southern Mexico and Guatemala. The denser ties among Otomí migrants have given rise to cooperative efforts such as the formation of a hometown association, bringing together Otomíes in Immokalee, Clearwater, and Las Vegas. The association raises money to support the annual fiesta and for small community development projects. This group of Otomí migrants appears to be the exception, however, as the Mexican immigrant population in Immokalee is highly stratified in terms of class, ethnic, and regional origin, and there is generally limited interaction between Mexican immigrants and other immigrant groups (Guatemalans and Haitians). The structural obstacles that undermine the accumulation of social capital for most migrant workers also limit the possibilities for collective solidarity and

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mobilization in Immokalee. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of immigrants in Immokalee do not participate in civic, religious, or political organizations. Moreover, the mobile livelihoods of migrant farmworkers make it difficult for organizations to sustain collective action.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers as a Second Exception The Coalition of Immokalee Workers presents a second exception to the rule of low levels of participation in Immokalee. Founded in the late s, the Coalition emerged to challenge the oppressive working conditions of migrant farmworkers in Immokalee. In contrast to most religious organizations in Immokalee, the Coalition has been able to generate bridging social capital in its efforts to forge a multi-ethnic social movement. Its members are Mexican, Guatemalan, Haitian, and Euro-American. They construct their individual and collective identity as exploited farmworkers in opposition to the growers, crew leaders, and transnational businesses, such as Taco Bell. The organization has links with many labor and student organizations around the country as well as with interfaith movements from all over the United States. It is precisely through liberal Christian denominations that the Coalition is able to survive economically, the paradox being that most of its members are not active in any churches in Immokalee. The actions of the Coalition gradually evolved from a strategy based on “organizing farmworkers by emphasizing solidarity and commitment to la causa” to one that combines community-based organizing with mobilizing external support through a direct attack on the “public identity” of both farmworkers and the agricultural industry. After hunger strikes and marches organized by the Coalition failed to convince growers to negotiate with the farmworkers, in spring  Coalition leaders turned their attention to organizing a nationwide boycott of Taco Bell. Taco Bell is the major client of Six L’s Packing Company, the largest single-company tomato grower, packer, and shipper in Florida. Given Six L’s repeated refusals to initiate talks with the Coalition, the aim of the boycott was to pressure Taco Bell to use its leverage with Six L’s to improve wages and working conditions for tomato pickers. The Coalition hoped to build off the success of consumer boycotts sponsored by farmworker organizations in other parts of the country. Moreover, it reframed its struggle to appeal to a broader audience. Appropriating the discourse of the “global justice” movement, Coalition leaders constantly referred to the sweatshop-like conditions in the fields of southwest Florida as a consequence of global capitalism. In addition, they depicted Taco Bell and its parent company, YUM Brands, as global fast-food giants who refused to accept corporate responsibility for their food supply chain. In adopting the global justice “master frame,” Coalition leaders hoped to amplify and extend their boycott to include new constituencies.

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This “scale shift” from localized actions to a national boycott of Taco Bell garnered extensive national media attention, most of it sympathetic to the farmworkers’ plight. As part of the boycott, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Student Farmworker Alliance (SFA) mobilized external support from a wide array of religious organizations, labor unions, and student groups throughout the country. After the first national caravan in spring , Taco Bell representatives agreed to meet with Coalition leaders. Despite their grudging consent to sit down with farmworkers, company representatives were unwilling to get involved in what they considered an internal labor dispute between farmworkers and growers in southwest Florida. Nevertheless, in May  the negative publicity generated by the boycott encouraged a substantial number of YUM Brands shareholders ( percent) to support a resolution calling for a review of company policies related to corporate responsibility. In March , the Coalition ended its boycott when Taco Bell acceded to all of its demands, including a penny-per-pound “pass through” with its tomato suppliers in Florida that will go directly to tomato pickers. At the March  press conference announcing the agreement, Lucas Benitez spoke on behalf of the Coalition: Human rights are universal, and if we as farmworkers are to one day indeed enjoy equal rights, the same rights all other workers in this country are guaranteed, this agreement must only be a beginning. To make those rights truly universal, other leaders of the fast-food industry and the supermarket industry must join us on this path toward social responsibility. With a broad coalition of industry leaders committed to these principles, we can finally dream of a day when Florida’s farmworkers will enjoy the kind of wages and working conditions we deserve. And when that day comes, the restaurants and markets of this country will truly be able to stand behind their food, from the fields to America’s tables.

Opportunities and Constraints Particular localities provide differing opportunities and constraints for transnationalism and collective action. Both our quantitative and qualitative data suggest that higher levels of social capital, greater cultural/ethnic homogeneity, and lower levels of social/cultural acceptance help foster and sustain more institutionalized forms of transnationalism in Jupiter, as compared to Immokalee. Not surprisingly, it is the more established immigrants in Immokalee that are most able to participate in transnational ties that require travel back to Mexico. In addition, social capital rooted in ethnic solidarity in the case of the Jacaltec Maya in Jupiter and the Otomíes in Immokalee provides a stronger foundation for more extensive and intensive transnational activities as well as bonding social capital. Finally, in Jupiter collective solidarity and mobilization that

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began with a form of reactive ethnicity and focused on gaining acceptance and visibility in the community became transformed, over time, into a broader coalition that crossed institutional boundaries. In Immokalee, mobilization has been multi-ethnic, class based, and focused on overcoming economic exploitation through the work of the Coalition.

Evaluating Reactive Ethnicity and Collective Action in Two Florida Communities As Portes and others have argued, reactive ethnicity can provide a solid foundation for collective identity and political mobilization. The mobilization of Latinos in California in response to Proposition  is a good example. Similarly, Popkin has documented the rise of reactive ethnicity on the part of Guatemalan Kanjobal migrants in Los Angeles in response to extensive discrimination. In addition to reinforcing old forms of ethnicity, Kanjobals have linked with the growing Pan-Mayan movement in Guatemala. In the case of Otomí migrants in Immokalee, dense social networks rooted in reactive ethnicity provide greater opportunities for social and economic advancement; however, the benefits of these dense ties do not extend beyond the Otomí community. In contrast, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is a multi-ethnic movement that plays down ethnicity and focuses on the root causes of economic deprivation among migrant farmworkers. The Coalition has been successful in projecting its struggle beyond the local level, leading a nationwide boycott of fast-food giant Taco Bell. The agreement with Taco Bell in March  provides real benefits to farmworkers and serves as a model for other farmworkers’ organizations that have achieved minimal success in pressuring agricultural producers to negotiate farmworkers’ demands. Soon after the agreement with Taco Bell, the Coalition organized a similar campaign targeting McDonald’s. After two years of mobilizing, on April , , the Coalition reached an agreement with McDonald’s and its suppliers, modeled after the Taco Bell settlement. The disadvantage of such a “scale shift” from localized action to broader national contention is that the Coalition has tended to neglect some issues of more local concern to the migrant community in Immokalee in favor of projecting itself on a national stage. Local issues that receive less attention from the Coalition include wages for farmworkers outside the tomato industry, inadequate housing, pesticide use, and immigration reform. A farmworker from Guanajuato, Mexico, who was a member of the Coalition for three years, complained: “Sometimes they do good things and sometimes they turn things around. What they do is go hacer un escándalo [make trouble] in different states in the U.S. and not achieve anything. Many members ask, ‘Why don’t we do the marches here? Why do they have to go to California to hacer un escándalo.’ A big

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group of people go to some office and shout slogans; then it’s over and everyone returns to Immokalee.” The challenge for social movements like the Coalition is to remain rooted in local communities even as they adopt global frames and opportunities for scale shift. As Sidney Tarrow writes, “Global framing can dignify and generalize claims that might otherwise remain narrow and parochial. . . . But by turning attention to distant targets, it holds the danger of detaching activism from the real-life needs of the people they want to represent.” In our case study in Jupiter, we found that Jacaltec Mayans face significant cultural and communication barriers and sometimes outright hostility to their presence. Not surprisingly, the early mobilization of immigrant groups in Jupiter tended to be inward-oriented, focused on reaffirming a Jacaltec identity and sense of belonging through transnational religious and cultural activities. Since then, the organizing efforts growing out of the Fiesta Maya have been aimed at achieving a more positive public image for the Mayan community and recognition for its contributions to the local economy. While receiving some support from prominent town officials and civic and religious leaders, Corn-Maya’s struggle to create a neighborhood resource center also met with significant opposition from some corners. As noted earlier, local neighborhood complaints about day-laborers and overcrowded houses were quickly transformed into an anti-immigrant lobbying group when representatives of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) began organizing in town. Although small in number, the members of the JNAIL organization received extensive press coverage from the local paper (the Jupiter Courier) and other local media as the town council debated the opening of a center. At the same time, public acts of intolerance toward the immigrant community increased, including public insults and derogatory statements at town council meetings, targeted acts of vandalism, and a sign that reads “Slow—Illegal Immigrant Children at Play” placed near the local elementary school. As Jupiter’s immigrants took to a more public stage to address concerns within their community, they also became the target of greater hostility on the part of some residents and found themselves in the sights of national groups such as FAIR. Another potential drawback to mobilization through reactive ethnicity is that it can contribute to defensive and even exclusionary politics. This may militate against the formation of broader collective solidarities. For example, during the planning for the second Fiesta Maya in Jupiter, a group of Mayan dancers from Totonicapán were invited to perform during the festivities. After much discussion among the members of the Jacaltec Association, it was decided that the invitation should be withdrawn because people back in Jacaltenango who viewed videos of the event might be upset by the intrusion. Despite the previous year’s decision that the event was to be open to various groups, the Jacaltec leaders were more concerned with their own particular connections with home than

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with building a sense of community with other groups. In other words, the very factors that facilitated unity and collective action among the Jacaltecos produced the opposite effect when applied to the larger Mayan community, the Hispanic community, and the immigrant community in general. Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut also argue that reactive ethnicity may have a less positive impact at the individual level: “Youthful solidarity based on opposition to the dominant society yields an adversarial stance toward mainstream institutions, including education.” The result, according to Portes and Rumbaut, may be a form of downward assimilation. In Jupiter, we found little evidence of downward assimilation among the second generation. Rather, the children of immigrants in Jupiter appear to gain as much (in terms of spiritual and psychological resources) from the celebration of the fiesta as their parents. While they do face discrimination and even outright intimidation in some cases, the celebration of fiestas and other activities sponsored by Corn-Maya and St. Peter’s Catholic Church allow the children of Jupiter’s immigrants to experience and take pride in their Mayan culture. As Portes explains, “participation in transnational political activities can empower immigrants and invest them with a sense of purpose and self-worth that otherwise would be absent.” In regards to the second generation, Portes adds that transnationalism “offers a valuable counterweight to a relentless process of acculturation” that “carries the price of learning and interjecting one’s inferior place in the social hierarchy.” In Jupiter, the transnational connections elaborated through the fiesta and other events appear to serve as something of an antidote to the process of downward assimilation among the second generation. On the other hand, young male migrants who arrive in Jupiter and Immokalee without family connections or extensive networks of friends are more susceptible to downward assimilation. Through interviews with both adults and youths, it quickly became clear that levels of participation in both religious and civic organizations are much lower among the youths than adults. Informal youth groups promote entertainment, distraction, and social activities including consumption of drugs and alcohol. In Jupiter, many of the youth travel to West Palm Beach to visit pay-per-dance clubs on the weekend, spending much of the money they have made for the week. For the most part, this cohort includes boys who leave Guatemala at age fourteen or fifteen to make the trip to Jupiter. In Immokalee, young immigrants who do not find work in the fields loiter along the main streets, while others whittle away the hours drinking alcohol on curbsides and in empty parking lots. At night, the drinking often gives way to street fights. These youths are truly in cultural limbo, arriving with hopes of making enough money to return, only to be quickly socialized by their peers into a very different culture. It is these youths who are most at risk of adopting the “adversarial stance” described by Portes. Far apart from their families and sending communities and unwelcome in the host community, young

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first-generation immigrants are highly susceptible to problems with substance abuse and a cycle of economic deprivation.

Conclusions Across the United States, groups of Mexican, Guatemalan, and other immigrants continue to arrive in new destinations, following employment opportunities and struggling to build their lives under difficult and even hostile conditions. Although limited to the very different cases of Jupiter and Immokalee, our study does shed light on how immigrants may organize themselves in variant contexts, and what the advantages and drawbacks of various forms of immigrant mobilization may be. First, our analysis supports many of the findings from earlier studies of Portes, Rumbaut, and others regarding the relationship between social capital, discrimination, and reactive ethnicity in traditional gateway cities. In contexts such as Jupiter, where high levels of discrimination from the primarily Anglo receiving community combine with greater ethnic homogeneity, we can expect mobilization based in reactive ethnicity, more institutionalized transnational linkages, greater mutual assistance, and higher levels of social capital. In contexts such as Immokalee, where ethnic heterogeneity and a less hostile community combine with economic deprivation, we will find less institutionalized transnationalism, less mutual assistance, and lower levels of social capital, but greater potential for the formation of an identity politics based on employment. Second, we confirm that specific locations provide particular opportunities and constraints for immigrant mobilization, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. In Immokalee, immigrants have mobilized across ethnic and other divides as farmworkers, successfully gaining concessions from major transnational corporations. In the context of the many struggles of immigrant laborers in the United States, this is truly a historic accomplishment. At the same time, the quality of life for agricultural workers in Immokalee remains deplorably low, there is little sense of community and mutual support, and the members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, in adopting a strategy of global framing of local issues, risk the danger of becoming “rootless cosmopolitans,” no longer connected to the real-life needs of the migrant farmworkers they claim to represent. In Jupiter, on the other hand, a greater diversity of employment opportunities makes employment-based mobilization less likely. While the day-laborers who gather to find work each day clearly have some common interests, their employers shift from week to week and even day to day, creating a moving target that makes organization more difficult. Ethnically based mobilization (reactive ethnicity) among the Jaceltec community has provided much needed leadership and institutional support for immigrant laborers in Jupiter. Furthermore, the

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quality of life, sense of community, and connections with sending community are much more institutionalized and stronger in Jupiter than in Immokalee. As outlined above, however, the potential downsides to this form of mobilization include ethnic cleavages, downward assimilation, and possible counter-mobilization from nativist and other groups. Finally, the trajectory of both cases hints at the critical role of bridging social capital for successful mobilization. As discussed in chapter , bridging social capital is distinct from more inward oriented “bonding” social capital in that it provides links between groups and organizations that live in relative isolation and aids in bridging racial, ethnic, and other social dividing lines. In Jupiter, connections with the university provided student workers, grant-writing resources, and links to local politicians that were otherwise not accessible to immigrant organizers. These links proved invaluable in terms of both providing a space for the fiesta and building the institutional capacity of Corn-Maya. In Immokalee, the links forged through churches and interfaith organizations and the widespread student support for the boycott of Taco Bell were central to the unprecedented victory for tomato pickers in their negotiations with YUM Brands. As the new geography of Latino immigration continues to expand in the United States, questions about how and when immigrants can successfully organize to promote their local interests will become increasingly urgent. Jupiter and Immokalee are instructive case studies as they demonstrate the complex ways in which immigrant communities negotiate both the opportunities and obstacles for collective action. Drawing both on a sense of community rooted in common ties and on modern strategies of protest and alliances with student groups, the immigrants of Jupiter and Immokalee have achieved substantial, if qualified, success in their attempts to become part of the American dream. In the words of Leon Fink, the struggles of these new immigrant workers, located at the bottom rung of U.S. society, “will likely tell us as much about our own dreams as about theirs.” APPENDIX: DATA, SAMPLE, AND METHODS

In Jupiter, census tract data from the  census demonstrated a relatively contained geographic area in which an estimated  percent of the Hispanic population resides. This information corresponded with descriptions of high residential concentrations of immigrants by local Guatemalan leaders during our qualitative interviews. The target area for our sample contained a total of twenty-seven streets and two large apartment complexes. Approximately eight hundred addresses were calculated on these streets using a commercial address/phone-number software product. Because of the uncertainty of the number of eligible respondents and an anticipated high refusal rate, we chose to visit each address on these streets instead of a selected sample of residences in Jupiter. In total,  residences were visited. We found  ( percent) residences with Guatemalan or Mexican residents,  ( percent) ineligible residences, and  ( percent) with no residents at home. We completed surveys at  ( percent) of the eligible residences, while  ( percent) respondents refused and  ( percent) were incomplete or asked that we return at a later date.

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In Immokalee, census data indicated  census blocks with high concentrations of Hispanic/Latino residents ( percent and above). We eliminated those blocks with less than

 residents and were left with  blocks with , residents. We randomly selected  census blocks with a total of , residents. Because of the anticipated high refusal rate, we chose to visit each address in these blocks instead of a selected sample of residences. In total, we completed surveys at  residences. As in Jupiter, interviewers were instructed to interview only persons born in Mexico or Guatemala and to interview only one member of each household willing to participate in the survey. The Jupiter sample was . percent Guatemalan and . percent Mexican,while the Immokalee sample was only . percent Guatemalan and . percent Mexican. The Immokalee sample was  percent male and  percent female. In Jupiter, the sample was

 percent male and  percent female. NOTES

1. Leon Fink, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 3–4. . According to Portes and Rumbaut, “reactive ethnicity is the product of confrontation with an adverse native mainstream and the rise of defensive identities and solidarities to counter it.” Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . In contrast, linear ethnicity represents a continuation of past cultural orientations and practices “rather than an emergent reaction to the present,” according to Alejandro Portes, “Conclusion: Towards a New World: The Origins and Effect of Transnational Activities,” Ethnic and Racial Studies  (): –. . See also Eric Popkin, “Guatemalan Mayan Migration to Los Angeles: Constructing Transnational Linkages in the Context of the Settlement Process,” Ethnic and Racial Studies  (): –. . Portes, “Conclusion,” . . See the appendix for a discussion of the survey data and methodology. . Ibid. . A key finding across the samples was the high number of individuals who reported that they had no friends in their current location (. percent in Immokalee and . percent in Jupiter). . The survey only asked respondents for their perceptions of discrimination against themselves not against their group. A few scholars point to the importance of considering perceptions of both group-level and individual-level discrimination. For example, see Deborah Schildkraut, “Identity, Perceptions of Discrimination, and Political Engagement: The Causes and Consequences of Reactive Ethnicity among Latinos,” paper presented at the  Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois. . See Dwayne Robinson, “Anti-Immigrant Protest Targets Day-Labor Site,” Palm Beach Post, March , , C. . The mean score for such participation was also significantly higher in Jupiter (means test is One-Way ANOVA). . Significance test is Kendall’s tau b (correlation coefficient ⫽ . with a . significance). . Alejandro Portes, “Conclusion”; Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); Sarah J. Mahler, “Theoretical and Empirical Contributions toward a Research Agenda for Transnationalism,” in Transnationalism

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from Below: Comparative Urban and Community Research, ed. M. P. Smith and Luis Guarnizo, – (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers, ). . Portes, “Conclusion”; Popkin, “Guatemalan Mayan Migration.” . Maria Herrera, “Guatemalans’ Needs Heard,” South Florida Sun Sentinel, February , , B. . Letter to the bishop drafted by board members of Corn-Maya. . For an explanation of bonding and bridging social capital, see Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, ), –. . Luis Eduardo Guarnizo and Michael P. Smith, “The Locations of Transnationalism,” in Transnationalism from Below, ed. Smith and Guarnizo, . . Goldring defines migrant-led transnationalism as “migrant-initiated practices and institutions that foster transnational social spaces.” Luin Goldring, “The Mexican State and Transmigrant Organizations: Negotiating the Boundaries of Membership and Participation,” Latin American Research Review  (): . . Guarnizo and Smith distinguish between the transnational practices of immigrants (“transnationalism from below”) and the transnational engagements of sending country elites (“transnationalism from above”). Guarnizo and Smith, “The Locations of Transnationalism.” . Peggy Levitt, “You Know, Abraham Was Really the First Immigrant: Religion and Transnational Migration,” International Immigration Review  (): –. . Chamácuaro is located in the municipal district of Acámbaro. The town has a population of approximately fifty-five hundred inhabitants. Residents have been migrating to the United States since the early s, and significant communities can be found in Illinois, northern California, and Georgia. . Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies. . Most of the Otomí migrants are hñahñu speakers from the small rural community of Santa Teresa Davoxtha in Hidalgo. . This is an example of “bonding social capital” that is inward oriented and reinforces ethnic identity. Putnam, Bowling Alone. . Brian Payne, “Taking Back the Reins of Identity Formation: The Evolution of a Grassroots Organization in a South Florida Migrant Farm Working Community” (MA thesis, University of Florida, ). . Craig Jenkins, “The Transformation of a Constituency into a Social Movement Revisited: Farmworker Organizing in California,” in Waves of Protest, ed. Jo Freeman and Victoria Johnson (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, ), . . According to Johnston, Laraña, and Gusfield, the concept of public identity “captures the influences that the external public [has] on the way social movement adherents think about themselves.” Hank Johnston, Enrique Laraña, and Joseph Gusfield, “Identities, Grievances, and New Social Movements,” in New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity, ed. Enrique Laraña, Hank Johnston, and Joseph Gusfield (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, ), . . According to Snow and Benford, “master frames” are large-scale interpretative frames that are generally associated with the emergence of a cycle of protest. David Snow and Robert Benford, “Master Frames and Cycles of Protest,” in Frontiers of Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller, – (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ). . McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly define “scale shift” as “a change in the number and level of coordinated contentious actions leading to broader contention involving a wider range of actors and bridging their claims and identities.” Doug McAdam, Sidney

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Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, ), . . The Student Farmworker Alliance (SFA) was founded in February  to support the March for Dignity, Dialogue and a Fair Wage led by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The SFA has chapters on university campuses in Florida, Michigan, and California, and has ties to student organizations at three hundred colleges and universities. . The proponents of the resolution were the Center for Reflection, Education, and Action (CREA), Trillium Asset Management, the United Church of Christ Board for Pension Asset Management, United Church Foundation, Christian Brothers Investment Services, and the Needmor Fund. . Eric Schlosser, “A Side Order of Human Rights,” New York Times, April , ; http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/06/opinion/06schlosser.html (accessed April , ). . Coalition

of

Immokalee

Workers,

“Victory

at

Taco

Bell,”

http://www.ciw-

online.org/agreementanalysis.html (accessed May , ). . Guarnizo and Smith, “The Locations of Transnationalism.” . Portes, “Conclusion.” . Popkin, “Guatemalan Mayan Migration.” . At the time of this of this writing, the Coalition was engaged in another campaign targeting fast-food giant Burger King. . Sidney Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, ), . . Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies, . . Portes, “Conclusion,” . . Ibid., . . Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism, . . It should be noted, however, that the El Sol Center now has a Worker’s Council that plays a major role in deciding policy for the day-labor portion of the center. Thus, the “bridging” social capital that was critical to the opening of the center has also provided an opportunity for individual transmigrants from Mexico and Guatemala to now organize themselves as “workers.” . Putnam, Bowling Alone; and Richard Wood, Faith in Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). . Fink, The Maya of Morgantown, .

6 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Immigrant Regime of Production The State, Political Mobilization, and Religious and Business Networks among Brazilians in South Florida JOSÉ CLAÚDIO SOUZA ALVES

In this chapter, I use the concept of immigrant regime of production to understand the political economy of Brazilian immigration to the United States. In particular, drawing from research among Brazilians in South Florida, I explore how the interaction between, on the one hand, the demands and needs of the Brazilian and American state apparatuses and, on the other, the “micro-physics” of immigrant networks facilitates the formation of an abundant, malleable, and cheap transnational labor force. After defining what I mean by an immigrant regime of production, I discuss the convergence of interests reflected in immigration policies in Brazil and the United States. I then characterize the dynamics of religious and business networks among immigrants, taking care to analyze their operation within the framework of these converging political interests. I am also interested in assessing the role that these networks may play in the political organization and mobilization of Brazilian immigrants. I focus on these two networks because they represent the most visible markers of presence for Brazilians in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach, the two cities outside of Miami-Dade County in which they have concentrated. I argue that while business and religious networks allow a certain degree of political mobilization around local issues, like easy access to driver’s licenses for immigrants, as well as national matters, like immigration reform, they ultimately do not challenge the transnational capitalist logic that compels Brazilians to migrate to the United States and to become incorporated into the American economy in a subordinate position. Moreover, often these two networks intersect to facilitate the extraction of surplus value from the Brazilian population in South Florida. This chapter, thus, complements Manuel Vásquez’s discussion on interpersonal immigrant networks in chapter  by focusing on larger, more institutionalized networks and their interactions with the state and the global economy.

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Immigrant Regime of Production In order to examine the interactions between religious and business networks, on the one hand, and the state and global economy, on the other, I depart from Karl Marx’s holistic conception of mode of production. As he writes in “The German Ideology,” “mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.” In other words, a mode of production is not simply defined by ownership of the means of production, but by the social and cultural arrangements that enable production. Following Michel Foucault, I see these sociocultural arrangements as organized in regimes of practice, “systems of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation” of power. Regimes of production function like crisscrossing and flexible yet hierarchical clusters of networks that allow domination and resistance, that is, the “action of men upon men.” At stake is the ability to harness the energies and capabilities of the body—in this case, the bodies of immigrants. For Brazilian immigrants in Broward County, intertwining religious and business networks provide the infra-structure of a regime of production that exploits them while simultaneously allowing them to navigate the challenges of a new destination. My second point of departure is the fact this local immigrant regime of production is embedded within a new global regime of capitalist accumulation. This regime is characterized by the rapid and mostly unregulated movement of capital and goods and a controlled flow of labor. As the United States positions itself as the hegemonic power in a polycentric world system, it has come to rely increasingly on the cheap labor of immigrants to be competitive vis-à-vis emerging economic centers like India and China, which have much lower labor costs. Latin American immigrants come to work in the service, construction, and agricultural sectors, all of which buttress the accelerated expansion of knowledge-based, technology-intensive sectors of the economy that give the United States the competitive edge over growing economies in Asia. For its part, in the effort to insert itself in the global economy, Brazil has implemented neo-liberal policies that have generated considerable social dislocation, including migration to swelling and unruly urban centers like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. There rural migrants demand basic services that the state cannot satisfy. As a result, migration to the United States becomes one of the strategies to deal with this growing social unrest. Both the United States and the Brazilian states, then, benefit from the process of migration. According to Michael Burawoy and Theda Skocpol, in

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order to make possible production and the extraction of surplus within capitalist economies, the state must regulate the relations of production, especially mediating through various legal and coercive means the conflicts and contradictions that emerge in these relations. It is in this context that we must understand the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, the increasing criminalization of immigrants in the United States, and the failure to pass a comprehensive immigration reform. By maintaining the status quo, that is, not allowing a path to citizenship for the  to  million undocumented immigrants in the country, while, at the same time, policing work places and living quarters with great vigor, the United States is limiting the possibility of immigrants to mobilize in a politically significant way. In effect, the current policy amounts to production and surplus extraction without enfranchisement. Immigrants fulfill the United States’ labor demand in the context of increasingly precarious and vulnerable social conditions. This is where local immigrant networks become essential, not only helping immigrants to create places to be but also benefiting the state by taking on the cost of the reproduction of a cheap labor force. In fact, it is plausible to see the transnational livelihoods that immigrants establish as crucial in the maintenance of a “reserve army of labor.” Our field research revealed that religious congregations are one of the most visible, institutionalized clusters of networks among Brazilian immigrants in South Florida. As we shall see, these networks do, indeed, facilitate the formation of collective identity and solidarity among Brazilian immigrants, giving them a measure of empowerment at the local level. However, participation in these networks very seldom translates into more explicit and organized sources of contestation, through which immigrants can challenge the logic of surplus extraction without representation, without political power. Moreover, some religious networks are even directly connected to the immigrant regime of production, closely interacting with business networks, the other visible cluster of institutions among Brazilian immigrants in Broward County. This interaction many times ends up reproducing dynamics of exploitation and domination. Before I move to characterize religious and business networks among Brazilians in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach and how these networks are part of the immigrant regime of production, I need to say a few words about political mobilization in Brazil. For part of the failure to contest the power asymmetries in the immigrant regime of production has to do with the political landscape in Brazil.

Collective Organization among Brazilian Immigrants Debates around the emergence of new social movements in Brazil in the s, after the military dictatorship, showed that it was reductive to try to fit various

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types of social and political organization along an evolutionary line, placing in the inferior stages associational forms based on kinship, locality, or interpersonal relations, with low levels of institutionalization and representation in the formal democratic system. This outmoded teleological approach also placed in a higher evolutionary stage heavily institutionalized forms of organization, with fixed bureaucratic norms and functions and high corporate representation. In other words, traditional ways of understanding political participation assumed that political parties and unions represented a more mature and effective way of organizing and mobilizing. Despite their pioneering contributions, the first analyses among Brazilian immigrants in the United States, such as those of Maxine Margolis, Teresa Sales, and Ana Cristina Martes, adopt this traditional focus on the most evolved forms of social organization. These studies demonstrate in rich detail the limits and contradictions in the ways in which Brazilians build collective identity abroad. However, by assuming that there is an organizational goal in terms of mature and effective collective life, which Brazilians have not met, these studies end up not identifying the real associational forms that already exist on the ground as well as the sociopolitical possibilities these forms open up. Therefore, I echo Vásquez’s critique of the concept of community in chapter . A balanced assessment of the possibilities for solidarity and social action among Brazilian immigrants must grasp the existing dimensions of their movements and sociability. It does not help to specify a time and place to find a real social movement among Brazilian immigrants, a movement based on idealized models considered more advanced, and then regret not finding it in actual historical conditions. Given that immigration from Brazil begins to gather steam toward the mids and that a large percentage of immigrants are in the range of thirty to forty years old, we safely can conclude that they experienced their key socialization period during the military dictatorship, which started in . During this period, not only unions and political parties were severely repressed, but through the Institutional Act  (AI-), promulgated in , state apparatuses arbitrarily arrested, tortured, and even killed citizens in the name of national security. It is not surprising, thus, that for the generation that began to migrate to the United States, sociability and organizational experiences took place through safer and more intimate relations with relatives, neighbors, and friends and in churches. Of course, we cannot forget the patrimonial and populist relations, which exploit, to some extent, these intense interpersonal relations. In any case, interpersonal relations are a key ingredient of the sociocultural fabric that Brazilian immigrants bring with them to the United States. These experiences of sociability in Brazil are reconstructed and reinterpreted abroad to make sense of the immigrant condition. This explains the heavy reliance among Brazilian immigrants on relations based on kinship and friendship, which, as Vásquez demonstrates, create some protective spaces of

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meaning and belonging in the face of spatiotemporal challenges posed by the process of migration. This reliance on past experiences, however, is mediated by social relations that the neo-liberal mode of capitalist production privileges, namely, self-interested individualism and competitiveness. If Brazilian immigrants are to succeed in securing a piece of the American dream, they must deploy their resources, including cultural ones, to maximize their personal material gains and social mobility. Often this means that Brazilian immigrants turn to their interpersonal relations to extract surplus and, in the process, reproduce a flexible immigrant labor force through self-exploitation. So, it is not uncommon for Brazilians to sustain potentially exploitative relations with relatives and friends. I am referring here to practices such as the “selling of houses” [venda de casas], that is, giving a compatriot a house to clean in exchange for a fee, or subcontracting landscaping jobs at reduced salaries. Practices of this kind demonstrate that, in a given regime of production, affective immigrant networks built on kinship, friendship, paisanaje, and church affiliation can interact with economic interests and activities with important consequences for immigrants and the nation-states linked by the migration process. In the rest of this chapter, I will characterize two of the most important institutionalized networks among Brazilians in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach, taking care to show how their interaction contributes to the operation of the immigrant regime of production.

Religious Networks Brazilian religious networks have a variegated morphology, ranging from complex, polynucleated webs, as in the case of evangelical Protestants, to a multiplicity of dyadic ties that are centralized around the figure of a single spiritual leader, as we found for a nascent Candomblé center. Catholicism represents a mixed model, containing highly centralized and hierarchical arrangements, but also relatively autonomous, horizontal religious movements that engage specific sectors of the Brazilian populations such as youth, women, and couples.

The Evangelical Protestant Network The most visible and established religious network among Brazilians in Broward County is that constituted by the roughly forty evangelical Protestant churches in the area. Within this network of networks, congregations generally average forty to fifty members, a size that allows for intimate interpersonal relations and worship. Each congregation has its own organizational and ritual logic as well as its own theological inflections. However, they always demand of members a high level of participation in diverse activities such as services, outreach ministries, Sunday school, prayer groups, and band practice. There is also quite a bit of circulation among congregations, not just of members who break from one

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church and become affiliated with another, but also in terms of participation in events that have significance for the entire Brazilian evangelical “community,” including visits by well-known preachers or Gospel musical groups from Brazil. In fact, one important dimension of the evangelical “social field” is its strong transnational character. Along with itinerant evangelists, who not only travel from Brazil to the United States but also actively missionize in Europe, Asia, and Africa, there are sustained flows of books and pamphlets that address theological and moral issues and bear witness to the conversions taking place at various locations in the network. Many churches in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach participate in this thriving transcontinental spiritual market, hiring professionals to record services or sermons on CDs or DVDs that are then sold by the thousands in both Brazil and the United States. The following quote from one pastor in Pompano Beach reflects the transnational enmeshment of local Brazilian evangelical churches in Broward County: “It was a challenge [desafio] accepting the invitation by a producer in Brazil to record those DVDs. I accepted, and I made one of Brazil’s best recordings, rethinking the prophecies. Some recordings are longer than seventy-five minutes, so that I made a total of almost fourteen hours of taped programs. We had financial difficulties, because we couldn’t find a partner in Brazil to speed up the process there. So we ended up producing a lot of the stuff here in the United States. For Brazil, we will just try to go with CDs, since DVDs are too expensive for the situation there.” In addition to the transnational flows, there are intra-national connections crisscrossing localities in the United States with sizable Brazilian populations. In particular, older, more established churches in the Boston metropolitan region send pastors to seed churches in Florida and to offer continuous support, advice, and spiritual renewal. This is the case of with the Assemblies of God’s Ministério de Boston, one of the most visible Brazilian evangelical churches in Broward County. I will have more to say about this church later on. Since they operate as a horizontal network of loosely connected small networks, following a model that has been termed “negotiated transnational religious organizations,” Brazilian evangelicals have been able, on the one hand, to respond effectively to the ever-changing needs of the local population through a variety of pastoral and ecclesial styles, which compete vigorously with each other. On the other hand, evangelical pastors in the Broward region have been able to articulate a flexible interdenominational association, which has become active on topics of great concern to Brazilian immigrants, such as the ongoing debates on immigration reform and the possibility of legalization of undocumented workers. As we shall see, this collective form of organization, while promising, has had limited success because it is embedded within the regime of immigrant production described above. One of the main protagonists in the evangelical pastors’ association is the Baptist church, which has about fifteen hundred members. At a cost of close to

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three million dollars, they have built a large structure, which functions not only as a temple but as a gym, allowing them to have soccer tournaments in the morning and services in the evening. The head pastor of this congregation maintains a close connection with the Brazilian Baptist Church, especially with the Junta de Missões Mundiais, based in Rio de Janeiro, which supports  missionaries and their families in several countries. As part of its outreach to the community, the Brazilian Baptist Church has provided a space for the Brazilian Consulate in Miami to hold weekly sessions. The church has also invited the local sheriff, health experts, and lawyers to discuss the situation of Brazilians in the region. Finally, between  and , the church played a major role in the attempt to gather one million signatures from throughout the United States asking for amnesty for undocumented immigrants. According to the head pastor of the Brazilian Baptist Church, this initiative emerged out of meeting between evangelical pastors and President George W. Bush: “Bush’s declaration was very, very good, because he tried to create a propitious national climate. This petition drive helped him put a stop to antiimmigrant ideas. After that, the draconian bill proposed by the Congress was relaxed a bit. The treatment [of immigrants] in the courts on the whole question of driver’s licenses eased up. . . . Now at least there is some tolerance. . . . [People] don’t call Immigration, don’t call the police. And this happened after Bush responded [to the petition].” Obviously, in the current climate of strong anti-immigrant feeling, the Baptist pastor’s reading of the impact of the signature drive is overly optimistic. Nevertheless, the church’s involvement in the initiative shows that, despite the widespread perception that evangelical Protestants are apolitical, certain sectors of the evangelical networks are capable of mobilizing Brazilian immigrants, even if only for short-term collective action. The Baptist pastor has also engaged the Catholic network. After co-celebrating with the local Catholic parish priest the funeral of a Brazilian girl whose family had connections with the two networks, the Baptist pastor was invited to a national meeting of Catholic pastoral agents. There he spoke to about one hundred priests and two bishops about potential points of agreement on matters of faith and religious practice. In return, the Baptist pastor invited the parish priest to attend the inauguration of the new church-gym complex. This kind of ecumenical exchange once again challenges the stereotype that evangelicals are inherently sectarian and that this sectarianism contributes to divisions within the immigrant population, divisions that may hinder collective mobilization. The Assemblies of God—Boston Ministry, now called World Revival Church (WRC-AD), the second most preponderant evangelical sub-network among Brazilians in the region, offers a stark contrast to the Baptist Church. The WRCAD was founded at the end of the s in the Boston area. It began with twelve individuals who met in a shoe store in Union Square in the city of Somerville.

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Today, the WRC-AD is at the crossroads of two large networks. First, there is the Portuguese-language district of the Assemblies of God, which in  had  pastors; many of them (such as the head pastor of the church in Pompano Beach) trained with their Euro-American colleagues. According to its founders, the WRC-AD has now more than eleven thousand members just in the United States, making it the largest Portuguese-speaking evangelical ministry outside of Brazil. The WRC-AD network has fifty churches throughout the United States, including twenty-six in Massachusetts and seven in Florida. In addition, there are twentynine churches outside the United States, of which eight are in Japan and six are in Brazil. This brings us to the second transnational network in which the WRCAD participates: it is linked to the convention of the Assemblies of God in Paraná, Brazil. In Brazil, the WRC-AD also owns a TV channel (CNT) and an FM radio station, allowing for religious services to be transmitted sometimes simultaneously in the United States and Brazil. There are also services on line, which, like the TV programs transmitted through CNT, often include prayers, expressions of support, and advice, as well as blessings for those traveling to the United States or returning to Brazil. Clearly, the WRC-AD operates bifocally, attempting to minister to Brazilian Pentecostals at all points in a transnational social field. Theologically, in recent years, the church has witnessed a revival movement (avivamento). Services now very frequently involve intense social effervescence, with members shaking uncontrollably and falling to the ground touched by the Holy Spirit, widespread glossolalia, prophetic utterances, and even cases of divine healing. Here, the WRC-AD simply follows the strong trend toward charismaticism among Latino churches. As we saw in the introduction, a recent study by the Pew Public Forum and the Pew Hispanic Center found that  percent of Latino Protestants identify themselves as charismatic or Pentecostal. Following this trend, the WRC-AD has increasingly come to see itself as a “spiritual hospital,” which seeks to treat physical, psychological, and social diseases like alcoholism, drug abuse, the breakdown of the family, and domestic violence against women and children. The church sees these diseases as manifestations of the hardships and isolation that Brazilian immigrants often experience. The focus on personal and moral renewal, however, has not meant that the WRC-AD has not participated in struggles for the rights of Brazilian immigrants. Particularly in Boston, as part of the cultural-civic council created by the consulate, the church has often raised its voice against exploitative labor conditions faced by Brazilians. In Pompano Beach, the WRC-AD also participated in the drive to collect one million signatures supporting amnesty for undocumented immigrants. As the examples of the Baptist Church and the WRC-AD show, evangelical networks among Brazilians in Broward County evince vitality, flexibility, and the capacity to operate at several scales, from the personal to the transnational. There is no question that these networks generate social capital, which can be

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mobilized to support causes beneficial to all Brazilian immigrants. However, building on the crucial distinction that Philip Williams, Manuel Vásquez, and Timothy Steigenga made in the introduction, this social capital has not translated into established political capital, into representative organizations that can contest power at the local, state, or national levels.

The Catholic Network In Deerfield Beach and Pompano Beach, this network is nucleated around the Nossa Senhora Aparecida Catholic Church, situated at the border between these two cities. This church brings together approximately three thousand members, although the number of individuals who participate more intensely in pastoral groups, marriage counseling encounters, retreats, and vigils is much smaller. The church originated in  as part of an initiative called the Brazilian Catholic Mission of South Florida, which was put together through the efforts of priests of the Scalabrini Order, an auxiliary bishop in Miami, and a lay group that wanted to worship in Portuguese. Prior to this initiative, Portuguese-speakers generally attended mass in Spanish or English. In the end, the mission brought together five Brazilian communities in the region: in addition to Nossa Senhora, there are churches in Kendall, Miami Beach, Hollywood, and Flamingo Road. In , the congregation at Nossa Senhora was able to secure the building in which it is now housed. Beyond the link to the diocese of Miami, Nossa Senhora is also connected with the National Conference of Catholic Bishops through its outreach to immigrants and ethnic groups, more specifically, through the Brazilian Apostolate, a group of priests, nuns, and lay people who work with various Brazilian populations across the United States. The Brazilian Apostolate is divided according to regions, each loosely organized by an informal rotation of duties among the various members. South Florida falls in the eastern region, with approximately seventy representatives who meet annually to exchange experiences and information. Thus, in contrast to the evangelical networks, the Catholic network among Brazilians in Broward County is much more centralized and hierarchical, seeking to connect organically parishes, missions, dioceses, and national apostolates. Whereas evangelical networks operate through horizontal integration, flexibly connecting small, autonomous groups, the Catholic Church functions through vertical integration, privileging the role of pastoral agents in the production and transmission of knowledge, decision-making, planning, and executing. Despite this centralization and hierarchization, however, there are movements within the church that provide a measure of flexibility. Arguably, the most visible of these movements is the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR), which offers what R. Andrew Chesnut calls a “virgophilic” version of “pneumacentrism,” a focus on the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which respects and reinforces the Catholic clerical structure and stress on the Virgin Mary. The CCR structures

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time and space around, on the one hand, the frequent weekly meetings of its participants to pray, sing, and study the Bible. On the other hand, just like the evangelical Protestant network, it depends on the national and transnational flow of speakers, leaders, books, CDs, and DVDs. However, in contrast to the evangelical Protestant network, the CCR in South Florida does not receive resources directly from the North, for example, from parishes with a strong Brazilian presence in Boston. Rather, the flow is more centralized, mediated through the Brazilian Apostolate, which coordinates the movement in and out of pastoral agents. Again, this difference has to do with the divergent morphologies adopted by Protestant and Catholic networks. Whereas the former thrives on multiple horizontal exchanges among mobile units, the later, due to its size and scope, allows for the proliferation of groups within a relatively unified and centralized structure. For example, as a counterpoint to the stress that the CCR places on the personal and emotive dimensions of Catholicism, there is within the Catholic community in Pompano a grupo social, a lay outreach initiative that seeks to help immigrants, mostly through immediate assistance in the form of food and clothing for those recently arrived. They also gather to discuss labor problems which Brazilians in the area confront. The transnational dimension in the grupo social has to do with the fact that this pastoral initiative mirrors approaches that developed in Brazil during the s and s, such as base Christian communities and liberation theology, both of which attempt to challenge social and economic injustices that fly in the face of Catholic social teaching. This approach, particularly in its preferential option for the poor, also animates the work of the Scalabrini priests who have served the Brazilian Mission of South Florida. They have brought a commitment to immigrants that is global in scope. Perhaps it is the internal pluralism and tension within the Catholic network, together with the liberationist themes, that limit the interaction between religious and business webs, which, as we shall see, is very intense among evangelical Protestants. To be sure, more established Brazilian Catholics hire recently arrived immigrants or those who do not speak English to do housecleaning jobs, often paying them low salaries and demanding long hours. However, this practice is constantly criticized by pastoral agents who would like all Brazilian immigrants to develop a sense of collective solidarity. In contrast, when neoPentecostals sacralize the quest for prosperity, they may be undermining the moral resources to condemn the practice of exploitation among immigrants.

The Spiritist Network In comparison with the evangelical Protestant and Catholic networks, the Spiritist network is much smaller, gathering three centers with a total of seventy to eighty members. Because the centers depend on the contributions of their members to cover all expenses, these centers are located at the periphery of the city of Pompano Beach, where cheaper space to rent is more available. The network

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is essentially built around families and friends that share a common worldview, particularly, the idea that the spirits of the dead interact with the living through the work of mediums and that these consultations can help resolve everyday problems. The network is then loosely organized. Although each center has a president and group of trained mediums who are in charge of teaching the doctrine and conducting the sessions, all these groups stress the principle of charity, the necessity to treat each other with respect and to assist each other in order to achieve higher levels of enlightenment. While Brazilian Spiritists, as a whole, do not have any concrete initiatives to address the needs of immigrants, the principle of charity, together with the call to avoid engaging in practices that may produce bad Karma, encourages members to act individually to assist other Brazilians, often helping them find work and a place to live. Moreover, a good number of Brazilian Spiritists in Broward County have incomes and levels of education above the average for the Brazilian immigrant population, mirroring the pattern observed in Brazil. This fact dovetails with the stress on charity, enabling the centers to engage in a certain redistribution of resources. Economic success among Brazilian Spiritists in South Florida has a different meaning than it does for evangelical Protestants. Spiritists do share with Protestants the focus on the individual and his or her spiritual well-being or renewal. For both Spiritists and Protestants, each person is responsible for his or her actions and fate. According to a Spiritist leader we interviewed, “We do things because we want things to grow, so that our professional community can grow. And by doing this we bring more people in, because we shine, as it were. We demonstrate to our bosses that we can do things well, so that he can be happy. But it is not just his happiness that matters. We treat all our clients well, and our bosses will hear about it. So, we receive praise and prizes among all employees for our good work. It is the effort, a thing that I learned from Spiritism, the responsibility.” However, we heard Spiritist leaders critiquing the attachment to material things as an impediment to spiritual evolution. In their educational talks to the group, these leaders explicitly construed the United States as a “materialist country” that needs to hear and understand the Spiritist doctrine in order to move to the next level. Brazilian Spiritists, then, see their presence in the United States as part of a new phase in the spread of their religion. In this sense, this network is informed by a missionary thrust that is in many ways similar to that found among evangelical Protestants. The three Spiritist centers in Broward County also sustain transnational and intra-national connections. Like evangelical Protestants, they often bring speakers who have achieved fame in the Brazilian Spiritist field. To sponsor these visits, the local centers may join forces with other centers in the Miami region. The linkages, however, extend beyond Florida: Spiritist centers throughout the United States exchange information and contacts through the Internet.

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In particular, as Brazilian members move from one city to another, the centers have a system of referrals that helps new arrivals find sister groups.

The Network of African-Based Religions Our fieldwork found two nodes of an incipient, precarious network of Africanbased religions. The first is a father of the saint (pai de santo), a Candomblé priest who attempted unsuccessfully to establish a religious center (terreiro) where he could perform spiritual consultations and train initiates. The second was an Umbanda initiate, who, upon his arrival to Broward County, found other initiates and began to hold rituals in his own house. Born and initiated in northeastern Brazil, the Candomblé priest migrated to New York in . As his practice grew in Queens, he was able to establish centers in Aracajú, Salvador, Interlagos (in São Paulo), and Lagos (Nigeria). Religiously, then, this pai de santo moves both transnationally, between Brazil and the United States, and diasporically, circulating in what Paul Gilroy has called the Black Atlantic. This priest said, “I live my life from (Inter)Lagos to Lagos. That is my world.” In , seeking to “retire” to Florida, he attempted to open a terreiro in Pompano Beach but a year later returned to New York, where he continues to give consultations, interestingly, not to Brazilians, but to Spanish-speaking Latinos such as Colombians, Mexicans, and Ecuadorians as well as to Euro-Americans, especially Jews. Our research team had the opportunity to visit his terreiro in Queens, New York. We were surprised by the eclecticism of his practices and the iconography. Depending on the matter at hand, he works with a diversity of tools, including divination with seashells (jogo de búzios), palm reading, tarot cards, astrology, and the Cabala. The images in the center include not only the African orixás (the ancestor spirits) but also Brazilian and Latin American spirits, like Caboclos (Native Americans), Pretos Velhos (the old slaves), Exús (the rogues and prostitutes), Maria Lionza (the Venezuelan female spirit of the forest), and other spirits of the Orient, like Buddha, Krishna, and Confucius. We can see this creative blending of symbols and practices as one of the ways in which the pai de santo has negotiated his transnational and diasporic livelihood and has adapted to the religiously pluralistic and multi-ethnic environment of New York. The creative mélange may also explain the relative absence of Brazilians among his clientele. Despite the fact that there is considerable religious mixing in Brazil, Brazilians might prefer “purer” versions of Candomblé as a way to re-affirm their identity abroad. Similar strategies of purification and return to origins have been observed among practitioners of Cuban Santería. The precariousness of this Candomblé network may be partially explained by the type of bonds that sustain it. In this case, since the pai de santo does not have any would-be initiates training under him, his “community” is formed by all the clients who seek his help and advice. Each of these clients has a personal,

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confidential relationship with the pai de santo that may be fleeting, built around a particular problem that once solved does not require further interaction, or more permanent, on the basis of ongoing consultations. In either case, the network is centralized, dependent on the charisma, credibility, and trust emanating from the pai de santo. In turn, the authority and credibility of the pai de santo is predicated not only on his success in treating his clients, who then spread the word about his sacred power, but also on his participation in the transnational and diasporic realms, which link his practices to Africa and Brazil. Thus, his mobility is part of the charisma he has at his disposal. However, this mobility also limits the possibility of creating new nodes in the network, such as the center he attempted to open in Pompano Beach, since these emerging nodes need his presence more than the established terreiros. The second network of African-based religion is anchored by a couple, an American who grew up Brazil and his Brazilian wife. While she came from a family that practiced Umbanda, he was not a follower. However, after getting married, she initiated him into the religion. Following his initiation they moved to New York in , where they only stayed for two years because she could not stand the cold. They then returned to Brazil, but in  they once again decided to move to the United States, this time to Florida. Once in South Florida, he began to attend a terreiro in Miami, organized by Venezuelans but led by a Brazilian pai de santo. However, he did not agree with some of the ritual practices of this group and decided to search for people interested in creating an alternative religious community in Broward County. Although he used the Internet to establish contacts, it was his advertisement in a local Brazilian newspaper that finally succeeded in attracting some people. Today, he leads a group of about ten, which meets every two weeks at the couple’s house. There they have set up a congar (altar) with the images of the saints as well as the assentamentos (the sacred objects where the orixás and spirits reside). They use CDs of Umbanda ritual music, since they do not have an atabaque (sacred drum). Participants at the sessions include not only several Brazilians but also a Venezuelan, a Cuban, an Uruguayan, and an American. Thus, in contrast to the Catholic and Protestant networks, this network is characterized by ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity. This diversity dovetails with Umbanda practices and cosmologies, which strongly stress syncretism, flexibility, and adaptability. Doctrinal and ritual pluralism and diversity in composition may be critical for the survival of this network in the dispersed context of South Florida. Another important particularity of this network that is worth highlighting is the transformation of domestic spaces into sacred spaces, linking religious practice with participants’ intimate lives. This dynamic, once again, resonates with the worldview of Umbanda, which is normally organized in tightly knit houses where a spiritual family dwells under the tutelage of a head orixá and a pai or mãe

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de santo. However, the anchoring of the network in private spaces might have more to do with the obstacles imposed by the urban and exurban context, which limit the public use of loud drums, alcoholic beverages, and cigars. One of the Brazilians in the Umbanda group is currently in the process of completing his initiation at a terreiro in Rio de Janeiro, once again demonstrating that, even in incipient religious networks among Brazilians in Broward County, there is transnationalism. In fact, despite having lived in the United States for a long time, this initiate considers himself more Brazilian than American, attributing this fact to his religious trajectory and goals—his spirituality and authority in South Florida derive from his personal and familial experiences in Brazil. Having characterized the key religious networks among Brazilians in Broward County, I will now turn to the other cluster of networks that has attained a relative degree of visibility, density, and institutionalization. We will see that these business and labor networks often interact with religious networks to give rise to a regime of immigrant production.

Work and Business Networks and Their Connections with Religious Networks Brazilians in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach are involved in multiple business enterprises and occupations, including cleaning services (in hotels, office buildings, and condominiums), landscaping, construction (concentrating on drywalling and roofing), transportation (especially of other Brazilians), food services (either as cooks or as servers in or owners of restaurants), car sales and rentals, retail (particularly selling foodstuff, clothing, books, music, and other articles that are constantly brought from Brazil), translation, and paralegal counseling. Despite the diversity of occupations, there are clear hierarchies of salaries based on personal ability and expertise and also dependent on time of arrival, on competence in English, and, more importantly, on relations of trust and reciprocity with clients and established brokers who provide valuable referrals. As with other immigrants, such as Italians and Irish in the Northeast at the turn of the twentieth century or Cubans in Miami, family—understood here as extended family, which includes uncles, aunts, cousins, godparents, and godchildren—and friendship are central in the articulation of Brazilian business and labor networks. The practice of recommending relatives or friends as pessoas de confianza (trustworthy individuals) is, indeed, generalized. For example, there is a booming business of “selling” houses to clean, where a person who has built a busy schedule of cleaning jobs through a long-term cultivation of clients transfers some of her or his jobs to friends or relatives, often recently arrived, for an amount. Or the more established person who has built trust with a client might subcontract a friend or relative to do the job. In this case, the

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subcontracted worker will receive a lower wage because he or she is new at the job. We found several small housecleaning agencies in which a more established Brazilian had three or four other immigrants working for her. While she can charge up to eighty dollars for each house, she only pays fifteen dollars per house to those who actually do the cleaning. A similar situation takes place in other areas of personal services such as babysitting. We found cases where Brazilians who started by taking care of the children of American families eventually became independent and set up their own child-care businesses. These new Brazilian entrepreneurs then hire other Brazilians to take care of their children while they run their business, paying their compatriots in a week what they earned in a day of work with an American family. We see the infrastructure sustaining what I have called the “immigrant regime of production,” a conflictive pattern of labor organization that runs on trust, intimacy, and reciprocity, all elements which are highly concentrated in familial and friendship networks as well as in religious organizations. Despite the conflictive and often exploitative character of this regime of production, it allows Brazilian immigrants to survive and even thrive through the tactical use of their own resources. Among Brazilians in Broward County, familial, friendship, and religious networks have often provided the initial capital, human resources (in terms of leadership and labor force), know-how, locales, and captive markets for the formation of business networks. As we saw above, evangelical churches very often operate as business networks by virtue of their emphasis on material success as a sign of salvation and on the individual as autonomous and self-driven by an ethic of hard work and entrepreneurship. Books, CDs, DVDs, gospel singers, itinerant preachers, selfimprovement courses, and outreach ministries are often part of a transnational market that strengthens local congregations. This is evident in the following statement given by a Brazilian evangelical pastor: You see, . . . this community got together to construct this building, which cost three million dollars, without a single penny from the outside, from Americans, from anyone. [This building] is totally Brazilian, with our help and cooperation. . . . It has the first soccer school within a church. [But how can we] have services on Sunday . . . and the soccer school functioning [on the same day]? It is because we discovered that the best way to attract children [so] they can think about God is to give thirty minutes to God and one hour to soccer. Do you understand? We know that things will compensate each other. So, we have our soccer school functioning full steam, [with] two full-time teachers [professionais], meeting three times a week. In that way, children are enthusiastic [vibram] about coming to church. We have  kids here in this church and sixty teachers in our children’s department [departamento infantil].

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In particular, the figure of the influential evangelical pastor who is simultaneously a successful entrepreneur serves as a paradigmatic example of the strategic link between religion and economics: Robert, . . . he is director of marketing, and that’s the reason why the work [the construction] was well done. He did a survey and discovered how many millions of dollars come in each month, the money that evangelicals make, each evangelical family. He calculated the salary of all evangelicals here in South Florida. He got a rough estimate from the money that each church collects. Each member gives at least  percent of his salary, which is the tithe, although in our church only  percent [of the members] tithe. So, he multiplied these figures for all churches and calculated the salary of evangelicals. And then he used [that number] as a guide, showing all the evangelical businesses that exist in the region. His idea—and there I don’t agree with him—is that brothers [i.e., evangelicals] should buy from other brothers.

Notice the ambivalence of the evangelical Protestant leader in response to the proposal of explicitly linking religion, production, and consumption. This might explain why, among Brazilian immigrants in Broward County, evangelical networks do not constitute a niche or a segmented market. Yet, these networks are definitely a crucial ingredient in the ethnic economic landscape. Particularly, for recently arrived immigrants in new destinations, without pre-established immigrant networks that can facilitate settlement, access to the labor market is very often made possible by information and business contacts flowing through the religious networks. These networks offer a degree of trust and authority unmatched by other informal connections. One immigrant said, “I was already attending the church of Pastor Olavo, but I went to his house [to talk to him about my situation]. And [then] in the church it was announced that I had just recently arrived and that I was looking for work and a place to live. Then, a church deacon found a room for me and a job painting. Within a day, everything was set up [esquematizado]. I had a church, a place to stay, and a job.” While religious networks may facilitate entry into the job market, they often do so in a position of vulnerability, in which the fact that the newly arrived immigrant does not speak English and does not know how to get around or how to negotiate the rules and regulations of the host society becomes the justification for low salaries and unsafe work conditions. The low salaries provide the surplus that drives the immigrant business networks, making it possible for them to expand and continue hiring the newly arrived. Obviously, this arrangement is fraught with tension. And it is here that religion plays a key mediating role: the pastor’s moral and spiritual authority, which is often expressed in his material success and that of his congregation, serves as a counterweight to the immigrant worker’s awareness of the low salaries.

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This is not to say that religious networks are particularly exploitative. We collected testimonies of newly arrived Brazilian immigrants who faced far lower salaries, longer hours, and worse working conditions in labor networks not having anything to do with religion. In fact, in many cases the jobs secured through church contacts were a good alternative to extremely exploitative labor arrangements. Still, I would like to highlight here that religious networks among the Brazilian immigrants we studied provide an important moral and spiritual infrastructure for the immigrant regime of production. The Catholic network is also part of this infrastructure, enabling the extraction of surplus among immigrants. However, at least in comparison to evangelical networks, this process is more restrained by Catholic social doctrine, which, even in its more conservative version, as in the thought of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, is consistently critical of capitalist exploitation of the worker. In the words of a Brazilian Catholic leader in Pompano Beach, There are always people who benefit from one’s ignorance and try to take advantage. This has always taken place and will always take place. Here we have even slave labor among Brazilians. There are people who take passports away, . . . people who have to submit to work, earning two or three dollars per hour, [people] who threaten: “Ah! I’m going to hand you over to immigration and . . . you have no passport.” It is for that reason that I have been moved to do the work I do [with social outreach], to do for the people that are just arriving what I wish someone had done for me. Here when people arrive they are very vulnerable; they can fall pray to people of bad faith [pessoas de má fé] who use your precarious state. Thus, I felt the desire to get involved in this work for the church, which is not my work. It is work for the community, a work for the church, to support the church.

The Brazilian Spiritist networks we encountered in Broward County also have a more ambivalent relation with business networks. On the one hand, their humanism, their emphasis on human development and education, predisposes Spiritists to be critical of outright economic exploitation. This critical attitude is further strengthened by the Spiritist value of charity. However, the Spiritists also believe that success and well-being are predicated on individual merit. The Spiritist ambivalence to the link between religion and business is well expressed by the following statement from a Spiritist leader: No, it’s not individualism. If you observe people, life, and religion, if you analyze everything, you will see that you will not be able to change anybody, that you cannot live somebody else’s life for him. That is not individualism; that is [assuming] one’s own responsibility. [One day] my boss called me to his office and told me: “Look, there is no other way about it. I will not find

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another person like you to work on the [assembly] line. You are a good guy [um cara certo] and I’m going to give you a raise and I will let you work as much as you want, in other words, overtime,  percent more than you normally earn.” [My boss] knows that I like money, that I like to work. So, he puts me to work six days a week, when everyone else only works four or five [days]. I work six and sometimes even seven days, if it were for him. So it is good for my professional development. And I will not change it. I already have a profession; I’m a cook and I like what I do. It is an Americanized thing, in an assembly line because it is a busy restaurant and you have to produce. But it is a gratifying business and people around you perceive the love that you put into things, the food comes out differently.

In the Candomblé network, in turn, legitimacy ultimately rests on the authority and authenticity of the pai de santo, despite the fact that the network is built according to the logic of a clientele which often exchanges money for advice, healing, and other spiritual goods. In this setting, authority and authenticity may be adversely affected if the interactions are primarily defined by financial gain. In the small circles that follow African-based religions abroad, word gets around quickly whether one is a legitimate religious leader or a charlatan. The potential for gossip, thus, limits the kind of business involvement that the pai de santo can undertake. Moreover, the notion of fate, which is closely associated with serving one’s spirit, does not encourage the same pursuit of this-worldly success as the individualism advanced by evangelical Protestantism, particularly in its neo-Pentecostal version. Here the pai de santo that we interviewed offers a good illustration: PAI DE SANTO:

I do not look for people. I do not deceive [iludo] anyone. If someone wants to come [to my house], he just comes and believes.

INTERVIEWER: PAI DE SANTO:

So they know about you from other people? Yes, they know. . . . I have a radio program and a TV program. At the moment I don’t have anything. Programs like those are too expensive. But I have time in Globo, also in Spanish. I left everything behind [when I went to Florida]. I’m well known here in New York. You see that I have my program and you come [to my house] if you want to. I’m not going to deceive and tell them, “Do this and do that.” I don’t ask things like that.

INTERVIEWER:

Yes, I saw your phrase: “Fate exists but you need to orient it,” something like that.

PAI DE SANTO:

Guide it.

A similar attitude is evident in the Umbanda center we studied. In the words of the terreiro’s founder, “In the seven months [that we have been open]

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people come and go. Some come and then disappear. I believe that if they disappear it’s because they won’t come back. I leave that to them. I am happy with the results in the lives of the others [who stayed]. Their lives are improving just like mine, and without the financial side. I tell everyone in our group [that] I’m a mechanic. Everybody knows that. I’m not capable of charging for the services that I give them. If I were someone else, I would maybe charge. It is my sustenance [sustento]. I cannot put a price [on my services] for my friends or relatives.” We see here how for the African-based religious networks among Brazilians in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach the interplay with business networks and with an economic ethos of accumulation is rather tenuous. In fact, these networks seem to be at one end of the spectrum—the other being neoPentecostal churches, which overtly link religious affiliation and practice with a process of credentialing newly arrived immigrants, giving them the contacts and moral sanction to enter a hierarchical job market. This spectrum shows the diverse, complex, and contradictory ways in which religion is involved in the immigrant regime of production among Brazilians in South Florida.

Conclusion In this chapter I offered the concept of immigrant regime of production as a tool to examine the role of transnational migration in the present stage of globalization, which is characterized by the geo-political hegemony of the United States and the economic dominance of neo-liberalism. Today, in the context of a “total war against terrorism,” a regime of immigration has taken shape which, on the one hand, requires immigrants to sustain the growing service and construction sectors as engines for internal development in the United States. On the other hand, this regime marks immigrants as undocumented, effectively rendering them as “non-subjects,” shadowy or even criminal figures with no political or social rights. In the case of Brazilians, this invisibility is reinforced by a Brazilian state which, while benefiting from the remittances sent by immigrants and using immigration as an escape valve to release the pressure produced by the social dislocation of its own neo-liberal policies, fails to have a coherent and comprehensive policy to re-enfranchise its citizens abroad. The Brazilian state basically benefits from the fruits of migration without any financial or political cost. Left to their own devices, immigrants assume the cost of their own reproduction as a labor force, drawing from their own social networks to create places to be. Further, by accepting low wages and precarious work conditions, immigrants are producing a capital surplus that is contributing to the growth of the U.S. economy. Following Marx’s holistic definition of mode of production and Foucault’s notion of regimes of knowledge and practice, this chapter also focused on the cultural dimensions of immigrant livelihoods in South Florida, highlighting the role of religious networks in organization, mobilization, and reproduction of a

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cheap reserve labor army. In particular, in new destinations such as Broward County, religious networks offer a variety of protective spaces and strategies to enter the labor market that makes it possible for immigrants to survive the increasingly hostile terrain and, in the process, to produce surplus value for the economic system. Very often, religious networks offer the contacts, credentials, and the initial capital accumulation to set in motion the immigrant regime of production. In that sense, religious networks are not mere reflections of economic processes or just ideologies that hide deeper social realities. Rather, they actively contribute to the emergence and operation of structures of production, providing a whole social and moral infrastructure, the local and transnational capillaries upon which economic and political hegemony is based. My argument, therefore, complements that made by Nina Glick Schiller, who has recently shed light on the role that fundamentalist Christian transnational networks play in the transmission of U.S. imperialism; according to her, the language of spiritual warfare and territorial conquest for Jesus in these networks contributes to the construction of an image of the entire world as a U.S. domain. My argument is that some transnational religious networks among Brazilian immigrants may be contributing not only to the spread of a neoimperialist ideology, but also to the incorporation of these immigrants into a new global form of capitalist accumulation. I showed, however, that religious organizations among Brazilians in Broward County do not simply buttress the extraction of surplus from a vulnerable labor force. Congregations sometimes can confront the panoptical policies of the state—the intensifying push to criminalize, apprehend, and deport undocumented immigrants—by mobilizing immigrants to challenge all the exclusionary implications of the term “illegal.” Nevertheless, because religious organizations need to attract immigrants to guarantee their own survival, they must offer day-to-day services that facilitate insertion in the immigrant regime of production. As a result, there are limits to what religious networks can do in terms of political mobilization and empowerment.

NOTES

I wish to thank Manuel A. Vásquez for his helpful comments and editorial work as well as for translating this chapter. . Karl Marx, “The German Ideology: Part I,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, ), . . Michel Foucault, Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, – (New York: Pantheon Books, ), . . Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . . See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, ).

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. Ronen Shamir, “Without Borders? Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime,” Sociological Theory , no.  (): –. . Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: New Press, ). . Michael Burawoy and Theda Skocpol, eds., Marxist Inquiries: Studies of Labor, Class, and States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). . See Rouse, “Thinking through Transnationalism: Notes on the Cultural Politics of Class Relations in the Contemporary United States,” Public Culture , no.  (): –. For a discussion of the concept of reserve labor army, see T. Bottomore et al., eds., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). . Maxine Margolis, Little Brazil: An Ethnography of Brazilian Immigrants in New York City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); Teresa Sales, Brasileiros longe de casa (São Paulo: Editora Cortês, ); Ana Cristina Martes, Brasileiros nos Estados Unidos: Um estudo sobre imigrantes em Massachusetts (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, ). . Peggy Levitt, “Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging: The Institutional Character of Transnational Religious Life,” Sociology of Religion  (): –. . The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Hispanic Center, Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, ). . Philip Berryman, “Churches as Winners and Losers in the Network Society,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs , no.  (): –; Manuel A. Vásquez, “Toward a New Agenda for the Study of Religion in the Americas,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs , no.  (): –. . R. Andrew Chesnut, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). . Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). . Ana Celia Perera Pintado, “Religion and Cuban Identity in a Transnational Context,” Latin American Perspectives , no.  (): –. . Nina Glick Schiller, “Transnational Social Fields and Imperialism: Bringing a Theory of Power to Transnational Studies,” Anthropological Theory , no.  (): .

PA RT T H R E E !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Identities and Lived Religion

7 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lived Religion and a Sense of Home The Ambiguities of Transnational Identity among Jacaltecos in Jupiter TIMOTHY J. STEIGENGA, SILVIA IRENE PALMA, AND CAROL GIRÓN SOLÓRZANO

One of the initial goals of this project was to understand the impact that various forms of religious transnationalism have on the formation or continuation of collective identities among immigrants in South Florida. In turn, we hoped to assess how such identities might foster and/or hinder civic participation among immigrants in the public sphere. Based on four years of research among Mayan immigrants in the community of Jupiter, Florida, this chapter argues that certain elements of lived religion among the Jacaltec Maya of Jupiter symbolically and practically recreate conceptions of “home,” thereby providing a sense of aggregate identity that has facilitated collective action. Some of the contextual factors acting as catalysts for this effect include a common sending community, ethnic and linguistic homogeneity, and the dominance of a single religious tradition. These factors, combined with low levels of social/cultural acceptance of immigrants in Jupiter, foster a sense of collective identity that has led to locallevel political organizing and collective action. But the story does not end there. In many cases, comfortable and safe recreations of home are more imagined than real. Nostalgia, family difficulties, and shifting transnational identities intrude and can shatter shared conceptions of a re-created home. When contextual factors are not favorable, divisions and other barriers to collective identity formation limit the possibility for collective action and expose differences within immigrant conceptions of home. Furthermore, the very factors that provide a sense of collective identity at the level of village, church, and ethnic group are likely to lead to divisions that inhibit collective action at an expanded level of identity (Mayan, Hispanic, or immigrant). Ethnically based political mobilization may also carry a heavy price in terms of acceptance within the host community and inter-ethnic conflict. In order to put this argument in context, we begin with a brief discussion of terminology and the transnational religious institutions and practices apparent 151

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in the Jupiter case. In particular, we focus on the transnational and identity linkages illustrated in the initial celebration of the Fiesta Maya in Jupiter in  and the ensuing examples of collective action among Jupiter’s immigrant population. We then turn to some of the specific impediments to broad community collaboration that are apparent in the case of Jupiter and may be inherent in social movements based in the formation of a shared identity politics characterized by reactive ethnicity. We conclude with some final theoretical reflections on religion and transnational migration.

Transnationalism and Lived Religion It should come as no surprise that “transnationalism” is a contested term. Scholars in the fields of cultural studies, religious studies, migration studies, political science, sociology, and anthropology use the term to mean very different things in different contexts. As discussed in chapter , in the broadest terms, transnationalism refers to activities, organizations, ideas, identities, and social and economic relations that frequently cross or even transcend national boundaries. As is the case in many academic fields, this broad definition creates a multidimensional levels-of-analysis problem for the study of transnationalism. Luis Guarnizo and Michael P. Smith distinguish between “transnationalism from above,” as the processes of globalization anchored in multinational governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and “transnationalism from below,” with a focus on the lived realities of migrants and their cross-border communities. Within the definition of transnationalism from below, Alejandro Portes adds quantitative and chronological dimensions, arguing that the volume of individuals and activities crossing borders must be both significant and sustained in order to be called transnational. Exactly how high the volume must be or for how long remains an issue of some debate. Moving beyond the study of individual transmigrants, Peggy Levitt focuses on the need to understand the social context of transnationalism. The social groups, identities, beliefs, rituals, practices, and power relationships in both sending and receiving communities (as well as locations in transit) are also critical to our understanding of the process and effects of transnationalism. Here lies the critical nexus between the study of transnationalism and the study of lived religion, for it is precisely the social groups, identities, beliefs, rituals, practices, celebrations, meanings, and power relationships among people that make up the substance of the study of lived religion. According to this perspective, the Pentecostal pastor proselytizing among day-laborers on Center Street in Jupiter and the families of those laborers back home in Jacaltenango are as much a part of the “transnational community” as the transmigrants themselves. For each of these actors, lived religion encompasses their embodied practices as they navigate the multiple locations and relations that constitute the fabric of their daily lives. In other words, lived religion takes place both inside and outside the formal process of “belonging”

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to a religious group. It is within this final level of analysis that this study is located, exploring the religious elements of transnationalism from below in the community that stretches between Jacaltenango, Guatemala, and Jupiter, Florida. Much of the literature on transnational migration is concerned with proving that there is something fundamentally new about transnationalism. While there are key differences, we approach the question of religious transnationalism from the perspective that many of the social processes embedded in the “new immigration” are similar to those involved with previous waves of immigration. While the speed, quantity, and even the quality of transnational connections have certainly changed, the effects of these connections in terms of identity formation, empowerment, and collective action hold both similarities and differences with previous waves of migration. In the case of Jupiter, this chapter seeks to demonstrate that recreated images of home have been both facilitated by and reinforced through a particular form of lived religion. Through planning, organizing, and celebrating a fiesta tied to their community of origin, Jacaltec Mayan immigrants in Jupiter have maintained and reinforced common ties of identity that facilitate cooperative public action beyond the festival. This process demonstrates clear parallels with the experience of previous migrant groups, such as those described in Robert Orsi’s study of turn-of-the-century Italians in Harlem. There are clear differences as well, however, as the very religious forces and ethnic and regional identities that foster collective mobilization in Jupiter also lead to differences among the larger Mayan immigrant population and continue to serve as impediments to Pan-Mayan or Pan-Hispanic activism.

Religious, Civic, and Transnational Organizations In our initial mapping of religious institutions in Jupiter, we found evidence of what Peggy Levitt calls extended, negotiated, and re-created transnational religious organizations. The Catholic Church generally falls within the first category. St. Peter’s Catholic Church, located closest to the majority of the immigrant population in Jupiter, had no Spanish Mass and no mission to the immigrant population at the inception of our study. Repeated attempts by the leaders of the Mayan community to make inroads into the church were rebuffed. However, following the celebration of the first fiesta, Mayan leaders pressed the local bishop to address this problem. Beginning in , St. Peter’s started a Hispanic ministry, which has grown significantly since that time. One of the priests, a nun, and several congregation members of St. Peter’s have become strong advocates on behalf of Jupiter’s immigrant community, speaking up on their behalf in front of the town council and working with local nonprofits to organize to support the El Sol Neighborhood Resource Center. South of Jupiter, the St. Ignatius Loyola Church in Palm Beach Gardens used to serve close to two hundred Guatemalans, divided between the Jacaltecos and

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other Mayan groups. There was little mixing between the Anglo and Mayan congregations served in the church, with Spanish Mass held separately and few opportunities for mingling. Some members of the St. Ignatius Church remain very active through the Tepeyac Mission in projects in Jacaltenango, supporting schools, fiestas, and a nutritional center. Tepeyac is an organization that is independent from the Jupiter parish, with its own independent board. While there are some clear and growing transnational connections between the institutional Catholic Church and the Mayan community in Palm Beach County, the majority of transnational religious organizing seems to fall into Peggy Levitt’s final two categories of negotiated and re-created transnational religion. Many of the more successful evangelical churches appear to have been initiated by “religious entrepreneurs” who found both a survival strategy and a source of authority through church founding. The Evangelical Church of Kanjobal in Lake Worth, the Templo de Adoración Familiar, and Cristo Rompe las Cadenas (an extremely charismatic evangelical group with a radio program) were all founded by early religious entrepreneurs in Palm Beach County. In a unique transnational twist, one pastor who left the Templo de Adoración Familiar is now working to spread the influence of the Guatemalan neo-Pentecostal Iglesia Elim in Palm Beach County through the use of the Internet. A relatively large number of Mayan immigrants also gravitate toward North American evangelical and Pentecostal churches. The Baptist church on Center Street in Jupiter has a significant immigrant membership, and a number of Guatemalans attend the Assembly of God church as well as the local Mormon church. The primary civic organizations that operate in Jupiter and the surrounding areas include Corn-Maya, Inc., the Maya Jacaltec Association, and, more recently, a group that was mobilized to support the creation of a resource/labor center to serve the immigrant community (formerly known as the Friends of the Jupiter Neighborhood Resource Center, and now called the Friends of El Sol, the new name of the resource center). Corn-Maya is a  (c) (), nonprofit, non-sectarian organization that was formed by Mesoamerican refugees and advocates in South Florida in the early s. The organization was formed initially to represent and assist the thousands of refugees, mostly Mayan indigenous people, who were fleeing civil wars in Central America. Since that time, Corn-Maya’s activities have included immigration services, referrals, interpreting services, emergency services, and the sponsorship of community forums for immigrant education on different aspects of rights and responsibilities in U.S. society. Corn-Maya has also sponsored a number of cultural events, including Guatemalan festivals, concerts, and dances. In , the organization became revitalized through the process of planning for the first Fiesta Maya in Abacoa (a new planned community that houses the Florida Atlantic University campus). The members of the Maya

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Jacaltec Association (a non-incorporated group of Jacaltec Maya immigrants) asked permission from the original founders of Corn-Maya to reinstate the nonprofit for operation in Jupiter. Corn-Maya opened a small office in Jupiter in  to coordinate services to the immigrant community. Corn-Maya also provided the initial impetus as a lobbying force to convince local authorities to make available a location for the resource center. In collaboration with the Friends of El Sol and with the support of funding from Catholic Charities, Corn-Maya helped to found the El Sol Resource Center, which opened its doors in September . The Friends of El Sol is a wide-ranging advocacy group made up of members of St. Peter’s, members of the Jupiter Democratic Club, representatives of CornMaya, students from Florida Atlantic University’s Wilkes Honors College, and residents from the Charter Neighborhoods, where Jupiter’s immigrant community primarily resides. Since , this group met monthly to lobby the town in support of a neighborhood resource center (including a day-labor center) to serve the immigrant community. The group’s support was critical in convincing the Jupiter Town Council to vote in support of using town property to house the resource center. Together, these civic and religious organizations made up of and in support of Jupiter’s immigrant community have been extremely effective in advocating for Jupiter’s immigrants. On its own, the immigrant-run organization CornMaya was unable to make significant inroads with local politicians. As increasing numbers of Anglo and Hispanic residents began showing up at town council meetings to show their support for the center, however, town authorities began to take the prospect more seriously. As discussed in chapter , in the end, successful lobbying on behalf of the center required a particular combination of immigrant mobilization, institutional support (from the university and the Catholic Church), a group of motivated and concerned community residents, and a single town council member who became a major advocate for the center after he attended a meeting of Corn-Maya and the Friends of El Sol group held at his church (St. Peter’s).

Lived Religion and Conceptions of Home According to anthropologist Allan Burns, “a well-documented aspect of Maya cultural identity in Guatemala is the connection that people have to the communities where they were born. The coincidence of language, the town or community, and culture has been described as the basis for Guatemalan Maya identity.” In his study of the Maya in Indiantown, Florida, Burns recounts the story of one recent Mayan immigrant who directly addressed the question of home. According to this woman, Indiantown lacked a sense of providing a home during her early years in residence. For her, the fact that there were no “graves of the dead” in Indiantown precluded that sense of home. But, as Burns explains,

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“within  years there were graves of Maya who had died in the United States, so Indiantown joined the home villages in Guatemala as a place where Mayan identity is defined.” If the study of transnationalism and lived religion is partly about re-created spaces and cultural reproduction, it is critical that we explore immigrant images and re-creations of home. This is hardly a novel idea or one that applies exclusively to the Mayan community. In his rich study of lived religion among Italian immigrants in East Harlem, The Madonna of th Street, Robert Orsi discusses some of the fundamental ambivalences that characterize the process of migration. He concludes, “The inner history of immigration is also a story of complex needs: for success, stability, participation and autonomy, faithfulness to tradition and openness to the new ways, the need to recreate the familiar while in the midst of change.” This is as true among Mayan immigrants in Jupiter today as it was among the Italian immigrants in Harlem at the turn of the century. Just as the southern Italians who came to New York sought to reproduce a sense of home through celebrating their devotion to la Madonna del Carmine through the celebration of the festa, Jupiter’s Jacaltec Mayan immigrants proudly march the streets of Jupiter’s newest development to honor their Virgin of Candelaria during their fiesta. For the Maya in Jupiter, these images of home entail physical, cultural, ideological, familial, religious, national, and local elements that combine to create a sense of belonging and identity in the face of a confusing and sometimes hostile environment. The fiesta, marimba, soccer tournaments, collections for return of the dead, and other transnational and religious elements combine to form a re-created sense of home in an otherwise foreign landscape. It is worth noting that most of these elements of lived religion are public, rather than private practices. As in the case of Immokalee (see chapter ), our respondents noted that their engagement in private religious practices (such as offering promises, candles, or prayers to saints) was much less frequent in the context of Jupiter than it had been in their hometowns. Unstable and crowded living arrangements, lack of access to transportation to purchase religious icons and elements, and other impediments likely play some role in the fact that fewer migrants engage in these religious practices in Jupiter than they do in their hometowns. To a large degree, the lack of private outlet for the practice of lived religion is precisely what makes the celebration of the fiesta such a critical component of shared religious and cultural practice in Jupiter. With all of its planning, celebration, tensions, and ambiguities, the fiesta provides important insights into the role of transnationalism and lived religion in immigrant life in Jupiter.

From Fiesta Candelaria to Fiesta Maya Planning for the initial celebration of the fiesta began in  and evolved from plans for a much less ambitious cultural exchange program involving the Mayan

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community and university students. University representatives, members of the Mayan community, and university students met with the executive director of the Abacoa Partnership for Community to discuss the possibility of a cultural exchange event for the Mayan community, the Abacoa community, and the university. As talks progressed, the possibility of including marimba music in the presentation was discussed. As dates for the event were debated, we found that the best date for all parties was the first weekend of February, which would coincide with the celebration of La Fiesta de la Virgen de Candelaria for the Mayan community in Jacaltenango. Ultimately, all parties decided to schedule a series of activities around the fiesta (soccer games between Mayan teams and students, traditional Guatemalan food, and a talk about the situation of Mayan immigrants in the Jupiter community). These initial conversations soon grew into a series of organizational meetings and plans for the festival. After many meetings and hours of planning, the Coalición Jacalteca de Jupiter formed a set of commissions, each responsible for different elements of the festival. The coalition met weekly in the months leading up to the festival to prepare for the Mass, procession, food, publicity, and other aspects of the celebration. Students and faculty from the university attended some of these organizational meetings and also participated in planning for the festival. As planning for the festival moved forward, however, some further countervailing tendencies within the process of “community building” became evident. The religious nature of the festival was questioned by some participants, while questions of inclusion or exclusion of the wider immigrant community were debated. One potential conflict that arose during the planning stages of the festival centered around divisions in the community between the primarily Catholic and traditional Jacaltec coalition and a group of Mayan evangelicals associated with a North American pastor at a local evangelical church. While initially enthusiastic about the project, the pastor began to express skepticism when he learned more about the religious nature of the festival. As the pastor explained, “I started out enthusiastic about the fiesta, but I guess I was also a little naïve. . . . [A]s soon as I began to mention this to our people I got a surprise. This fiesta is only embraced in the Christian community by those who are Catholic or pagan. It is not participated in at all by other Christians in the evangelical groups. Though the majority in most Spanish-speaking countries are from Catholic background, this is not true in Guatemala, where the majority is evangelical.” As these religious and cultural dividing lines emerged, organizers of the festival were also warned by university officials about using university premises for religious events. After hours of discussion on the merits of inclusiveness, cultural identity, and religious significance, the Maya Jacaltec Association eventually came to the decision to remove religious references from publicity for the

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festival and to restrict religious activities to off-campus locations during the morning of the fiesta. The festival was renamed and advertised as the Fiesta Maya. We will return to this issue in the discussion below. As outlined in chapter , the fiesta celebrated in Jupiter includes the final playoffs of the soccer tournament, traditional Guatemalan food, a procession and performance of the Dance of the Deer, and traditional marimba music and Jacaltec dance. With each year, the festival has grown in size (drawing nearly two thousand participants in ) and has expanded to include participating music and dance groups from other Latin American countries. Organizing for the initial fiesta sparked the rebirth of Corn-Maya and kicked off the process that would include a sister city agreement between Jacaltenango and Jupiter, visits from Guatemalan dignitaries (President Oscar Berger, Vice President Eduardo Stein, Minister of Foreign Affairs Jorge Briz, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu), and culminate in a major campaign to support and fund the creation of a neighborhood resource center. In order to understand the movement from organizing a fiesta to organizing collective action in the interest of the immigrant community, it is necessary to explore the transnational connections as well as immigrant perceptions of the meaning of the fiesta.

The Fiesta as Transnational Landscape and Social Field One of the clearest transnational connections in the Fiesta Maya relates to publicity and coverage of the event during the first year. No less than five video cameras were wielded by Guatemalan participants to document the procession, Mass, soccer game, and multiple interviews. Throughout the day, Guatemalan Mayans could be heard in front of the camera sending salutations to their friends and families in Jacaltenango. At least two of the cameramen flew to Guatemala to show their work during the celebration in Jacaltenango. During the nights of celebration before and after the fiesta, videos of previous celebrations in Jacaltenango were shown on a television set up in the backyard of a Jacaltec Mayan Association leader’s home. Another connection took place via the radio airwaves. One individual who was unable to attend ceremonies in either Jupiter or Guatemala received a live report of the Jupiter celebration from a local leader via cell phone. During the celebration in Jacaltenango, this individual called a local radio station in Guatemala and passed along news of the Jupiter fiesta. The traditional marimba played for the procession also illustrates the transnational nature of this cultural and religious festival. In the months leading to the first festival, a traditional marimba was located, but it was in a serious state of disrepair. A local Mayan carpenter was able to make the major repairs, but the essential replacements were not available in Florida. Arrangements were made to ship the tela (vibrating reeds made from pig intestines) from

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Guatemala in the final weeks prior to the festival. During the preparations for a subsequent celebration of the festival, project researchers found themselves negotiating with Guatemalan customs officials over export taxes and shipping on a new marimba after they found a fully constructed marimba waiting for them at the airport upon their departure for fieldwork in Florida. After considerable negotiations, they were able to deconstruct the marimba and carry it in various pieces of luggage, arriving just in time for the fiesta in Jupiter. Some of the transnational connections related to the fiesta are institutionalized through the San Isidro Association, a group that works and organizes both in Palm Beach County and in Jacaltenango. The association is made up primarily of traditional Catholics who collect funds for social services and church-related organizations and fiestas in Jacaltenango. Some of them travel to Jacaltenango each year for the fiesta. Other connections are institutionalized through the leadership the Guatemalan-Maya Center, Inc., located in Lake Worth. The Guatemalan-Maya Center provided support and traditional attire for the procession and dance at the first fiesta. Each year, replacement trajes are frantically shipped from Jacaltenango to Guatemala City, where unsuspecting friends and family with plans to travel to Jupiter are deluged with requests to bring extra pieces of baggage containing the trajes, replacement parts, or other items related to the fiesta. A final transnational religious connection is personified in the priest from Jacaltenango who said Mass during the first year’s fiesta. The priest, who was forced into exile during the violence of Guatemala’s civil war, is revered as a community leader in Jacaltenango and is widely respected among the Mayan immigrant population. He performed services to bless the traditional costumes for the baile de venado the night prior to the festival, said Mass the morning of the fiesta, and then flew to Guatemala to attend the final nights of the fiesta in Jacaltenango. The nights of celebration preceding and following the public celebration of the Fiesta Maya also provide evidence of the creation of what Peggy Levitt has called “transnational religious space as an alternative landscape.” The night prior to the second year’s festival, project researchers were invited to a community member’s house for the blessing of the procession marimba and other materials. The entire backyard was covered with tarp, under which a central altar was erected with the image of the Virgin surrounded by candles and the costumes for the Dance of the Deer. Churrasco and tortillas were served to the sounds of a perpetually rotating set of marimba players. As the night progressed, coolers of beer appeared, more and more people arrived, and eventually the crowd formed a circle to begin the dancing. At that moment, we made our first visit to the transnational religious landscape of Jacaltenango, Guatemala. We returned to visit this remarkable alternative landscape each night for the rest of the week-long celebration.

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Identity, Solidarity, Action, and Home As illustrated in the festival and surrounding activities, religiously and culturally re-created images of home may assist transmigrants in the process of maintaining a sense of identity and solidarity in the face of the many difficulties encountered in daily life. Our interviews with members of Jupiter’s Jacaltec community provide evidence for this process. As one young member of the Jacaltec community explained, “the unity among Guatemalans is essential. We unite with the purpose of showing this country who we are so that they pay attention to us . . . and so we can get our papers.” A community leader in Indiantown added the following: “The success of the Guatemalans is that they help each other, in contrast to the Mexicans who don’t have support. In the larger cities there is less solidarity.” Reflecting on the first year’s fiesta during an ensuing meeting of the Jacaltec coalition, one of the local leaders put it this way: “This was the first time that we were able to show the people our culture, the Dance of the Deer, the marimba. That was important. But what was even more critical was that we were able to celebrate our most important event of the year in such a place [Abacoa], . . . a place for rich people.” As noted in chapter , the roots of this solidarity and sense of accomplishment are to be found in shared images of home, shared practices, shared language, and a shared sending community. Funds collected to return los muertos, soccer leagues organized around hometown groups, assistance paying loans to coyotes, informal labor networks, and membership in hometown associations such as the Maya Jacaltec Association all link to form a web of formal and informal networks of personal and institutional support. Given impetus by the fiesta, these connections were translated into pathways toward political organizing and institution building through Corn-Maya and the campaign for a resource center in Jupiter.

Ambiguities within Immigrant Conceptions of Home and Collective Identity In light of the successful campaign for a resource center in Jupiter, it would be tempting to conclude that mobilization based in transnationalism and re-created images of home represents a uniquely positive strategy for newly arrived immigrant groups to pursue their collective interest. While this may be the case, it is critical that we also explore the ambiguities, nostalgia, and contradictions inherent in the process of transnational migration and community building. In the years following the first fiesta, we have conducted focus groups and individual interviews with the participants. The following description of one such focus group exchange captures a sentiment repeated in multiple interviews. The interviewer prompted the group of seven men by asking what their

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home was like when they left it. Her description, a summary report of their ensuing conversation, provides us with clues to some of the ambiguities within re-created images of home: In remembering Guatemala they recall the poverty, but also the freedom, the marimba music, the festivals, traditions (cacao drink), semana santa, processions, and most of all the Fiesta de la Candelaria. They talk about the flowers used in this festival; purple flowers that grow high in the trees and require the most agile young men to collect them. They also recall the food (tamales). Everyone participated in this festival. They are happy that they can do it in Abacoa because they feel like it’s a rich place and it took a lot to get there. Still, they feel that the procession here is just a summary of the real thing. At home no one works on this day; it is solemn and at the same time joyous. Everyone drinks during the fiesta, even the women drink. This is a stress release for them; they don’t have to worry, and it is seven days of true freedom. Mostly here in Florida during the fiesta they miss the landscape of their homes, the mountains and the rivers.16

As Allan Burns has demonstrated, transnational migrants often maintain multiple identities that cross national boundaries and traditional “ways of being Mayan.” In relation to images of home, Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser add the insight that “conceptions of home are not static but dynamic processes, involving the acts of imaging, creating, unmaking, changing, losing and moving homes.” In other words, the relatively simple notions of home and collective identity we have utilized up to this point require further elaboration. Clearly, there is more to immigrant images of home than comforting thoughts of solidarity. There are also immeasurably strong feelings of nostalgia, stresses related to families separated by long distances and borders, and pressures to assimilate and shift identities to fit the alien context of Jupiter. While there are multiple individuals in the Jupiter community who illustrate the more complex aspects of the strategic and changing nature of identity among the Maya in exile, we will focus here on a single case, Juan Gonzales. Juan maintains multiple identities and a life that spans the miles between Jupiter and Jacaltenango. In Guatemala, Juan initially held a job in road construction, traveling the country to work on multiple government and private projects. He made his first visit to the Jupiter area in , but returned to Guatemala to finish a project building bridges. In the mid-s he returned to Jupiter, only to leave again for work in Guatemala, this time with a government-sponsored nonprofit organization. With the election of Alfonso Portillo in  the program for which Juan worked was cut, and he made the trek to Jupiter a final time. His wife and children remained in Jacaltenango. Since Juan’s daughter was la reina of the festival in Jacaltenango in , he was able to obtain a special visa for a

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visit from his wife and daughter for the festival in Jupiter in . This was the first time Juan had seen his wife and daughter in two years. Shortly afterward, Juan returned to Jacaltenango to reunite with his family. Juan was a community leader here in Jupiter. His house served as a meeting place for Corn-Maya and was the central location for pre- and post-fiesta nights of celebration. In Jupiter, Juan worked in landscaping and restaurant work. Any funds above and beyond his expenses he weekly remitted to his family in Jacaltenango. Juan was, in the words of Allen Burns, able to live “with ambiguity and seemingly opposite values and ideals.” His house served as the center of the traditional Catholic celebration of the fiesta. The image of the Virgin and the lighted candles took center stage in his living room for the duration of the first year’s celebration. Yet Juan also attended services at an evangelical church in Jupiter. When he first arrived in the early s, Juan frequently attended Mormon services. Prior to leaving Guatemala, Juan played in a musical group that performed for services in both traditional and charismatic Catholic churches. For Juan, these seemingly contradictory activities and values are part of a survival strategy or situational identity that makes perfect sense given the context and opportunities available. While in Jupiter, he was metaphorically with his family in Jacaltenango each and every day in the form of letters, phones calls, and financial contributions. He crossed borders based upon changing economic opportunities and changing political contexts. He was more than willing to utilize whatever religious or social connection appeared most expedient to survival in a changing and potentially hostile environment. Juan’s story suggests that immigrant conceptions of home and identity are not as straightforward as it might at first seem. As he navigated the multiple elements of his identity, Juan was faced with emotional difficulties and personal trials. During one of the nights of celebration preceding the fiesta, Juan stood with a group of older Jacaltec men reminiscing about the physical geography of Jacaltenango. As the night wore on, the group’s conversation took on a distinct note of sadness as they discussed the particular type of flowers (mentioned above and necessary for the procession in the fiesta) that grow only on the mountain outside of town. By the end of the night, when the talk turned to family members (both living and dead), most of the group was in tears. Similar scenes have subsequently unfolded during many nights of gathering for the annual fiesta. Juan’s story provides only one illustration of the problems with accepting universally positive or simplistic notions of home and identity. When prompted to talk about their home and what they miss about it, most Mayan respondents in Jupiter referred to the unity, warmth, and caring of family life at home. Most expressed the desire to be reunited with family in a single location. On the other hand, some of the young Jacaltecos we interviewed were content to be away

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from home. As far as they were concerned, Jupiter provided the best of both worlds: they could live and work among other Jacaltecos without having to take on certain responsibilities or follow certain norms that would be enforced had they remained in Jacaltenango (as outlined in chapter ). For the most part, however, these stories were the exception. Almost inevitably, interviews focused on home and family quickly turned toward many of the interpersonal, economic, and family problems associated with carrying on relationships over distance. Stories of infidelity, illegitimacy, and changes in values were common. The Mayan men and women living in Jupiter are painfully aware that just as they seek to re-create some of their most positive images of home here, their very presence in this location is fundamentally changing their homes in Jacaltenango. As remittances flow from Jupiter to Jacaltenango, the economic and social impact is not lost on the immigrants who send them. Most of those we interviewed were well aware that their remittances and construction of their newer block houses have driven up property values to the point that families who do not send migrants to the United States can no longer afford housing in Jacaltenango. Consumption of higher-cost imports has also increased among remittance recipients in Jacaltenango. One respondent explained that the kids back home now demand that their fathers send them Nike shoes—they refuse to wear the shoes made in Guatemala now that their fathers are making money in the United States. “People no longer want to work the land,” one of our older respondents lamented, adding that they had become consumers, interested only in what people are doing in the cities and in the United States. He also mourned the damage done to the environment in Jacaltenango. He said that the land which was once so beautiful and could easily provide people with what they needed to eat had been sucked dry and destroyed by overuse and exploitation. Possibly even more distressing to the Jacaltecos in Jupiter are the social changes that they have begun to notice going on back home, changes that they willingly attribute to their own migration and remittance sending. Respondents reported discipline problems with children whose homes lack male authority figures, spouses who misuse remittances, and increases in alcohol abuse among women and children. There have been many cases where marriages have broken up and families have been divided because of the distance and time. As one respondent put it, “Some say that if we are doing well economically then we are doing well . . . but if my wife is sleeping with another man then what do I have?” Three important insights arise from these interviews. First, images of home and the identities constructed around them are fragile and ambiguous. Just as home is re-created and celebrated through the festival and surrounding activities taking place in Jupiter, it is simultaneously under assault in Jacaltenango. From the need for transmigrants to assume different identities across contexts

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to the social and economic effects of remittances, Jupiter’s Mayan immigrants find their most cherished memories of home and their aspirations for the future increasingly in peril. Second, the migrants are fully aware of this tragedy. Because transnational connections are so strong, Jupiter’s Jacaltecos remain painfully aware of events and activities at home. Frequent phone conversations, e-mails, videos, and the human grapevine pass information back and forth on a regular basis. What quickly becomes clear is that the decision to come to Jupiter is made in spite of these known risks. Here we see another parallel with Robert Orsi’s analysis of Italian immigrants in Harlem. In describing the festa among Italians, Orsi writes that it is “not about individuality but about selves united in social worlds, not about transcendence but about religion’s place in everyday life, not about autonomy but about the ways that people come to be within the forms of their culture, not about empowerment but about living within the coordinates of the possible.” While this statement characterizes many of the similarities between the experiences of Italians in New York and Mayans in Jupiter, it is the final line that is most fitting. The fiesta in Jupiter is about many things, but it is mostly about the everyday struggle of “living within the coordinates of the possible.” Jupiter’s immigrants are keenly aware of the trade-offs necessary to achieve the possible. They play out their lives within the tension between home and away, past and future, dreams and realities. Sometimes during the nights of the fiesta, as the younger men drink and listen to the marimba music, they cry out with high-pitched screams and yells. The yelling appears almost involuntary. The sound invokes something between deep sorrow, frustration, and release. One young man described the yelling as a celebration of what is not. They yell for the women who are not here with them, for the families they cannot start or reunite with, for the steady work they cannot find, for the legal status that is out of their reach, and for their homes, which hold little promise for them should they return to them. And this leads to a key difference between the experience of turn-of-thecentury Italian immigrants and Mayan immigrants in Jupiter today. A fundamental difference is that most Jacaltecos come with the (frequently thwarted) intention of returning to their homes at some point. For most, the hope is that four or five years of work in the United States will provide the financial assets necessary for them to return to life in their hometown. This is rarely possible. Some return only to come back again a few years later. Others stay but hold onto the dream of returning some time in the future. As one of the elder statesmen of the Jacaltec community explained, “In Guatemala when I was young I was very happy with my land, my little garden, my tomatoes. . . . I didn’t have any psychological problems. Now I do. . . . I wish I could go back to Guatemala. I am a U.S. citizen, but I wish I could go back there so I could live the life that I wanted. So that my self [soul, being] could go back to what it used to be.”

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Further Ambiguities: Religious and Ethnic Divisions As with images of home, some of the religious and social institutions and processes surrounding the fiesta also hold ambiguities and contradictions. Clear religious cleavages exist in the transnational social field that has emerged between the Guatemalan Mayan immigrant community and the small Guatemalan town of Jacaltenango. These divisions cut across families and social groups. As noted earlier, divisions between evangelicals and Catholics nearly undermined the process of planning for the first fiesta. To this day, some of the evangelical churches discourage their members from attending the fiesta, though many of them find their way into the audience to view the procession and the Dance of the Deer. Among the evangelicals we interviewed we also found significantly fewer connections to home villages and less interest in returning to Guatemala than we did among Catholics. While evangelicals also send remittances, their adoption of a new home in their churches in Jupiter, along with the notion that some of the traditional elements of their previous lives are now forbidden, leaves less room for the formation of a transnational Jacaltec identity than among Catholics. One evangelical young man explained, “I’ve managed to get a house and I’ve helped my brothers go to school. I have four brothers. I’m not married. But it is hard to find a good woman, because they’re liberal and materialistic. My relationship with my worldly family in Guatemala is by telephone. From time to time I send them money.” Another evangelical lay-pastor echoed this sentiment by stating that he sees himself as part of a new community of brothers and sisters in the church. Where they come from is less important than who they are now. His church is small, but it has members from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Venezuela, and Cuba. Interviews we conducted with evangelicals in Guatemala also illustrate some of these differences, but from a very different perspective. An evangelical shopkeeper we spoke to in Panajachel was virulent in his critique of those who migrate: “Once they go away they become in love with the lifestyle, and they forget about their family and their church here. Immigration destroys our families and undermines our churches and our values.” The charismatic/non-charismatic split is also a powerful social dividing line. In Jacaltenango, the Catholic Church split into two congregations along the charismatic divide long ago. In Jupiter, this division continues and serves as a major impediment to cooperative collective action among the Mayan immigrants. While both charismatic and non-charismatic Catholics are active in community programs, philosophical, theological, and practical differences keep them from working together on a regular basis. Any event involving alcohol or some forms of marimba music is likely to be avoided by the charismatics. According to one Catholic lay leader, “some of them [charismatics] run the risk of being fundamentalist. They are

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against the Mayan cosmovisión. For example, they say that the marimba is the devil’s rib. But they are also devoted to community work.” Other divisions that undermine solidarity relate to national, language, and ethnic differences. During the planning for the third year’s fiesta, a group of Mayan dancers from Totonicapán were invited to perform during the festivities. After much discussion among the members of Corn-Maya, it was decided that the invitation should be withdrawn because people back in Jacaltenango who viewed videos of the event would be upset by the intrusion of seeing another town’s queen in their fiesta. Despite the previous year’s decision that the event was to be open to various groups, the Jacaltec leaders were more concerned with their own particular connections with home than with building a sense of community with other groups. The very factors that facilitated unity and collective action among the Jacaltecos produced the opposite effect when applied to the larger Mayan community, the Hispanic community, and the immigrant community in general.

Conclusions This study is located within the literature that focuses on transnationalism from below and the transnational community that is formed through social groups, rituals, practices, beliefs, and institutions that span borders. We argue that re-created images of home help Jacaltec immigrants in Jupiter to foster their sense of collective identity. The images of home are evident in the celebration of the fiesta, in the organization of soccer tournaments with teams from the corresponding aldeas in Jacaltenango, and in the practice of collecting funds to return the bodies of the dead to be buried in Jacaltenango. A transnational community has been created and reinforced by secular and religious institutions, practices, ideas, and individuals who frequently pass between the borders of Guatemala, Mexico, and Florida. This sense of collective identity has translated into public action, much of it directed toward resolving the common difficulties faced by the immigrant community. Since its rebirth through planning for the fiesta, Corn-Maya has worked to build bridges with the community, address questions of workers’ rights, help individuals obtain language skills and immigration papers, and ameliorate some of the effects of loneliness and nostalgia through community organizing and social events. The fiesta is particularly revealing, because the connections between religious, cultural, and social mobilization are clearly illustrated in the results of the process of planning and organizing the fiesta. As is often the case, religious and cultural institutions provide resources, motivations, and ideological legitimacy for community organization and collective action. In this case, a previously defunct social and political organization (Corn-Maya) was revived and reactivated through the process of planning and implementing the fiesta. Activities which began with a primarily cultural and religious motivation were

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transformed through dialogue and action into a springboard for community organizing and civic engagement. On a cautionary note, we do not wish to assign unambiguously positive connotations to images of home or to mobilization through reactive ethnicity. As Juan’s story suggests, identity is far from static and must be negotiated across borders and experiences for individual immigrants, a process fraught with emotional and physical hardship. Furthermore, recollections of home are often tinged with sadness, loss, pain, escape, and, in some cases, regret. Re-creations of home for transnational immigrants can bring forth all of the social, psychological, and physical images associated with home, including very negative images linked either to the horrific conflict in Guatemala or to other dramatic personal experiences. Jacaltec immigrants live with the tension of knowing that their presence in one place creates an absence in another and that the very support they send to their families in the form of remittances undermines some of their most deeply held community values. We should also note that mobilization based on religious or cultural identity can create divisions within the transnational community as well as build connections. Our interviews with evangelicals suggest that they are less likely to retain strong connections with their families in the sending communities than are Catholics. However, the evangelicals we spoke to are more likely to attend churches that are made up of a multiplicity of ethnic and national groups. In other words, evangelicals may be more likely than their Catholic counterparts to join and participate in larger groups and assume identities as Hispanics or simply as evangelicals. Finally, the very transnational religious and cultural factors that draw the Jacaltec community together may also serve to keep it apart from the larger Mayan and Hispanic communities in general. As Patricia Fortuny and Philip Williams point out in the case of Immokalee, transnational religious, cultural, and hometown connections are weak, but the pan-ethnic Coalition of Immokalee Workers is relatively strong. In Jupiter, by contrast, Corn-Maya is very active, but attempts to forge Pan-Mayan links remain in the incipient stages. The ethnic and cultural divisions that have emerged during the planning for the fiesta are not atypical of the relationships between the different Mayan immigrant groups in Palm Beach County. What generalizations and hypotheses emerge from this study? First, collective identity bolstered by ethnic, linguistic, and religious homogeneity and transnational connections can lead to successful collective action in immigrant communities. In the face of a foreign and relatively hostile environment such as Jupiter, this may lead to successful mobilization based in ethnic identity. Second, the concept of lived religion and the practice of studying it can assist social scientists in understanding the way that collective identity is reinforced through re-creations of home in immigrant communities. At the same time, by examining lived religion in detail, we gain a window into the fundamental

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ambiguities within immigrant conceptions of home. Immigrant identities are flexible and fragile. To “live within the coordinates of the possible” for Jupiter’s immigrants means living away from their loved ones while simultaneously witnessing the deleterious effects of their absence and the decidedly mixed impact of their social and economic remittances. Third, the patterned differences in transnationalism and attitudes toward migration between Catholics and evangelicals merit further study. While these findings are only preliminary, it may be the case that evangelicals are less likely to migrate than Catholics. Furthermore, immigrants who join evangelical churches after migrating may be less likely to maintain their transnational connections or mobilize along ethnic lines. In other words, these evangelical immigrants may be more likely to form identities less linked to their ethnicity and also may be less likely to return to their communities of origin. Finally, religious and ethnically based mobilization among immigrant groups is a double-edged sword. The very glue that holds Jupiter’s Jacaltec community together serves as an impediment to Pan-Mayan, Pan-Hispanic, or even pan-immigrant organization. Among the many individuals we have interviewed in Jupiter, we have frequently heard the statement, “Los jacaltecos son bien organizados” (the Jacaltecos are well-organized). The significance of this statement, however, varies with the individual making it. While the members of Corn-Maya make this assertion with pride, many of the other Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants we have interviewed do so with a mixture of grudging respect and even resentment.

NOTES

. See chapter  for a more complete description of the role of reactive ethnicity in this collective mobilization. Also see Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . . See Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); Alejandro Portes, Luis Guarnizo, and Patricia Landolt, “Introduction: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field,” Ethnic and Racial Studies  (): –; Anna L. Peterson, Manuel A. Vásquez, and Philip J. Williams, eds., Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, ). . Lius Guarnizo and Michael P. Smith, “The Locations of Transnationalism,” in Transnationalism from Below, ed. Michael P. Smith and Luis Guarnizo, – (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, ). . Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt, “Introduction.” . See Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser, eds., New Approaches to Migration? Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home (London and New York: Routledge University Press, ). . Peggy Levitt, “Between God, Ethnicity, and Country: An Approach to the Study of Transnational Religion,” paper delivered at the Center for Migration and Development, Princeton University, .

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. See David Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); Robert Orsi, ed., Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ); Karen McCarthy Brown, “Staying Grounded in a High-Rise Building: Ecological Dissonance and Ritual Accommodation in Haitian Vodou,” in Gods of the City, ed. Robert Orsi, – (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ). Indeed, our survey results showed that more than  percent of our respondents reported that they never participate in religious organizations. . Robert Orsi, The Madonna of th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, – (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). . Levitt, “Between God, Ethnicity, and Country.” . Also see Allan Burns, Maya in Exile: Guatemalans in Florida (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ). . Ibid., . . Ibid., . . Orsi, The Madonna of th Street, . . The figures in Jupiter are even more striking than in Immokalee. In Jupiter, we found that only . percent of our respondents reported offering candles or food to saints, while . percent reported doing so at home. For making promises to saints, only . percent reported doing so in Jupiter, while . percent reported that they had done so at home. . Levitt, “Between God, Ethnicity, and Country.” . Focus group conducted by Anya Canache for research on her honors thesis, “The Maya in Jupiter, Florida: Remittances and Immigrant Perceptions of Change in the Home Community” (Honors thesis, Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University, May ). . Allan Burns, “Identities in Diaspora: Mayan Culture and Community Today,” in Identities on the Move: Transnational Processes in North America and the Caribbean Basin, ed. Liliana Goldin, – (Albany: SUNY Press, ). . Al-Ali and Koser, New Approaches to Migration, . . Burns, “Identities in Diaspora,” . . See Canache, “The Maya in Jupiter, Florida,” . . Ibid. . Orsi, The Madonna of th Street, xviii. . This is not to imply that significant numbers of Italian immigrants did not return home, for many of them were part of the transient labor pool of the early s, sometimes referred to as the “birds of passage.” The difference for the Mayan community is that the intention to return is nearly universal but frequently thwarted. See Reed Ueda, Postwar Immigrant America: A Social History (Boston and New York: Bedord/St. Martin’s, ), . . See Canache, “The Maya in Jupiter, Florida,” . . In the process leading up to the most recent fiesta (), a separate group of Jacaltecos broke away from Corn-Maya and attempted (unsuccessfully) to organize a competing fiesta after complaining that the leadership of Corn-Maya was not sufficiently attendant to their own cultural and religious suggestions for the celebration. . There has been some significant recent headway in this respect with the creation of the Guatemalan Coalition in  through the work of immigration attorney and Guatemalan honorary consul Aileen Josephs.

8 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Looking for Lived Religion in Immokalee PHILIP J. WILLIAMS AND PATRICIA FORTUNY LORET DE MOLA

Our research in Immokalee, Florida, was based on the assumption that religion would be highly salient for Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants. As discussed in chapter , the notion of the saliency of religion among immigrants is well established in the literature on religion and immigration in traditional gateway cities. Contrary to secularization theories that anticipated the privatization and marginalization of religion in modern societies, Stephen Warner argues that immigrants’ “religious identities often (but not always) mean more to them away from home, in their diaspora, than they did before.” Similarly, Raymond Williams, in his study of Indian and Pakistani immigrants in traditional gateway cities in the United States, argues that “immigrants are religious—by all counts more religious than they were before they left home—because religion is one of the important identity markers in helping them preserve individual self-awareness and cohesion in a group.” Recent work on religion and immigration in traditional gateways has tended to concentrate on congregational life. This approach emphasizes “what new ethnic and immigrant groups [are] doing together religiously in the United States, and what manner of religious institutions they [are] developing of, by, and for themselves.” During our preliminary research in Immokalee, we learned that congregations can provide limited “spaces of sociability,” which function as intimate spaces where immigrants can find voice and fellowship and develop civic skills. Nevertheless, unlike the case of immigrants in traditional gateways, our preliminary research found that, given their “mobile livelihoods,” most immigrants in Immokalee are not spiritually connected to religious congregations. On the contrary, it is the more established immigrants that are most active in congregational life; however, they represent a minority of the immigrant population in Immokalee. Recent debates in anthropology have questioned the notions of locality upon which congregational studies are based. In the context of globalization 170

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characterized by transnational flows of capital, goods, people, ideas, and culture, the “natural” connection between culture and locality can no longer be assumed. Instead, as Anthony Giddens argues, global modernity facilitates the “disembedding” of social relations from local contexts of face-to-face interactions and restructures them “across indefinite spans of time-space.” Paralleling these debates, in religious studies there has been a move to study religion beyond localized congregations. These new approaches focus on lived religion, “what people do with religious practice, what they make with it of themselves and their worlds.” Our research in Immokalee sought to build on these developments in anthropology and religious studies, assuming that religious life was just as likely to take place at home, in the workplace, or in the streets as in religious congregations. Moreover, following Robert Orsi, we viewed religion as “a network of relationships between heaven and earth,” with all its ambiguities and ambivalence, avoiding the “notion of religious practices as either good or bad.” At the same time, we were careful not to ignore congregational life altogether. As Orsi warns, “it would be unfortunate if the turn to lived religion meant simply changing the valence of the familiar dualities while preserving them, just substituting religious practices in the streets and workplaces for what goes on in churches.” We found that religion, while important, may be less salient for Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants in Immokalee than in their communities of origin. To make some sense of these findings, we begin with a discussion of the congregational life of immigrants, focusing particularly on two churches—one Catholic and one Pentecostal. The next two sections examine lived religion, including prayer, popular devotions, and public religious practice. We conclude with some reflections on the implications of the research for the broader literature on religion and immigration.

Congregational Life: “Here We Come to Work” In Immokalee, immigrants can choose from a diverse array of churches to live their religion communally. Here we will focus on the two most important congregations in Immokalee. The Catholic church, Our Lady of Guadalupe, is the largest Christian organization in Immokalee. It was founded in  by a group of priests from the Scalabrini Order. With the arrival of Father Richard Sanders in , the church began to offer Masses in several languages (Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Kanjobal, in addition to English). During Sanders’s time as priest (–), the parish established the Guadalupe Center, offering a number of social services. Of all the churches in town today, the Catholic church offers the most complete range of social services to the immigrant community. It runs a soup kitchen every day and Catholic Charities provides clothing and showers for the needy. Most importantly, the Guadalupe Center provides legal services and advice for immigrants. Since , when Father Sanders was in charge, the Catholic

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church has supported the rights of farmworkers. The current parish priest, Father Ettore Rubin (from Italy), is very supportive of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and has even obtained financial help from the Diocese of Venice for its members. In this sense, the Catholic church is embedded in a broad network of Catholic and community organizations that provides important resources for its social service delivery to the immigrant population in Immokalee. A significant sector of more established immigrants attends the Catholic church. However, only a small minority of Catholics commit themselves to church activities beyond taking part in the sacraments (Mass, baptism, and other rites). The Catholic church does not provide many opportunities for immigrants to build “spaces of sociability.” The time spent together is limited to the Sunday Mass. Although Guatemalan and Haitian Catholics also attend the church, the organization of religious services in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole tends to reinforce the segregation of groups along ethnic lines. According to María, a lay leader at Our Lady of Guadalupe, the church has been unsuccessful in organizing a social hour after Mass: “We tried to offer coffee, a refreshment, pan dulce after the seven-thirty Mass, like on Mother’s Day or Father’s Day . . . but they just grab what there is and leave; they don’t stay around to socialize. . . . Many people that come are single; families come but they are here to work not to make friends. They work; they have their group where they work . . . [and] they come here and pray but not to socialize with other people.” After the Catholic church, the Bethel Assembly of God Church (Iglesia Betel) has the next largest immigrant congregation in Immokalee. The church was founded in  and now enjoys modern facilities with a congregation of approximately three hundred members. The steady growth of the congregation has prompted the church to offer two services on Sunday. The majority of members are Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans, with a small number of Guatemalans. The pastor, Josué Rincón, came to the United States from Matamoros, Mexico, in  and has lived in Immokalee since . After two years working en la labor, Rincón found work in a local school and then as a car salesman. Rincón was raised by an evangelical family back in Mexico, but when he arrived in Immokalee there were few evangelical churches that ministered to migrant farmworkers. The church’s founding families began worshiping in their homes, before renting a church in town to hold services. Rincón studied at a Bible institute in Fort Meyers and in  abandoned his work en el mundo to dedicate himself full time to the ministry. Since then, his charismatic preaching style and appealing personal biography have facilitated the church’s efforts to win over new converts. As in the Catholic church, the most active members of the congregation tend to be more established immigrants, although many recently arrived migrant farmworkers attend services. The church is particularly effective in attracting younger couples and has a very active youth outreach program. In an effort to build a sense of community beyond the Sunday services and to propagate church doctrine, church

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leaders organize prayer groups that meet in different members’ homes during the week. Once a group reaches a membership of thirty, a new group can be spun off in a constant effort to cultivate new members and leadership for the church. Pastor Rincón is politically conservative and speaks openly in church of his fervent support for President George Bush and his policies. He often employs an apocalyptic discourse and biblical literalism to denounce homosexuality and abortion and to preach against drinking, smoking, and other pleasures del mundo. According to Rincón, alcoholism and drug addiction are the result of sin rather than social diseases. The asceticism required of church members can produce a transformation of household consumption patterns. When men convert, the resources normally spent on drinking, smoking, gambling, visiting prostitutes, and extramarital affairs are redirected into the household, thereby increasing household economic capital. Although churches in Immokalee do provide some limited “spaces of sociability” for building ties between church members, they also tend to reinforce rather than bridge ethnic, regional, and social differences. Moreover, the social capital generated in these spaces resembles “bonding” social capital that is inward oriented and tends to reinforce group identity. This is particularly the case with the Bethel church, where established immigrants have achieved not only “spiritual well-being” but also a level of social and economic success. Most of the members of the youth group study at the local high school, several women hold good jobs in local businesses, and a few members have their own small businesses in the area. The church plays a fundamental role in reproducing social networks that facilitate members’ ability to find work in Immokalee or the surrounding area. Moreover, the church’s theological and political conservatism and its social control over the lives of church members can have a beneficial impact in a context of extreme poverty, domestic violence, crime, and job insecurity. Although both churches generate social capital, different groups of immigrants access it differently. According to our survey (N ⫽ ),  percent of respondents said that they “never” or “almost never” participate in a religious organization. Not surprisingly, it is the more established immigrants that participate most actively in congregational life and tend to benefit most from their access to the social networks created within the churches. Migrant farmworkers, on the other hand, attend Sunday services infrequently, as it is the only day that they can rest and take care of their household chores. Back home, church attendance is often a family affair; however, in Immokalee, the overwhelming majority of migrant farmworkers are young, single males. Lucas Benitez, a leader of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, described the situation facing many migrant farmworkers: When you’re in your country, you have your family there, your children. If you’re not married, you at least have a girlfriend or something; it’s another

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form of relationships. In contrast, when you come here you find yourself in a situation of desperation: first, you live in a house with ten or eight people that you don’t know; then you start feeling nostalgic; and instead of saying, “Let’s go to the movies” or “Let’s go with our friend to church” or something like that, more than likely you go to the store and buy some beer. And a little later you’re drunk and the problems begin, because “I don’t know anyone”; one of your roommates gets upset because of what you’re doing, listening to music or something, and then the problems start.

When asked whether he attended church, Pánfilo’s response was typical: “Here we come to work.” Many immigrants make a clear separation between their religious participation in Immokalee and in their communities of origin. For example, here are the responses of some immigrants: I have no time to think about religion. Back home I go to the Catholic church when I’m there, and our patron saint is St. John the Baptist and we organize a fiesta and everything. But here we don’t have time to go. I arrive home late from work. It’s important to go [to church]; maybe one day I’ll be able to go. (Farmworker from Pacula, Hidalgo, Mexico) If I’m free and if I have time, because my day off I try to spend with my children, because since I work and I don’t have time for my kids. But when I can I go to the [Catholic] church but now I don’t go regularly. It’s like one doesn’t have much religion now because one’s work doesn’t allow it. (Farmworker from Miahuatlán, Oaxaca, Mexico) I’m Catholic but I don’t attend church much. Here’s it’s just work, work, work. I only have time to pray, for my family, my mother and my brothers and sisters in Mexico. (Farmworker from Guanajuato, Mexico) In Mexico I was Catholic. But I came here and now I’m not of any religion because I don’t have time for it. Here it’s pure work, pure work. Here I don’t go to any church. But, yes, I read the bible; I read religious books. (Farmworker from Tamaulipas, Mexico) I’ll tell you, here I’ve lost much of my emotional sentiment because you close yourself off in your work; everyone works; everyone is in this situation. When I was in Mexico I went to church; when I felt bad or sad I entered a church, even if I was alone, and I left feeling very at ease, at peace and with another emotional state. Here I’ve gone very few times to church, but the times I’ve gone it’s as if entering any other place. I don’t feel the same vibration. I don’t feel faith. So I hardly ever go to church. (Farmworker from Distrito Federal, Mexico)

For migrant farmworkers in Immokalee, churches provide few opportunities for creating “alternative places of belonging,” where they can form meaningful relationships with the locales they inhabit and transform “space” into “place.”

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Compared to other immigrants, migrant farmworkers are the dispossessed, los de abajo (the underdogs), los jodidos (the screwed). Often separated from their families, they suffer most directly and dramatically the consequences of a hostile, alien environment. Subjected to these “multiple marginalities,” they are especially disadvantaged: first, because of their undocumented status; second, because of their limited social capital; and third, because their social networks are either non-existent, incipient, or with individuals in the same economic situation as themselves. With average annual earnings of approximately seventy-five hundred dollars, migrant farmworkers have few possibilities to accumulate the kind of economic, social, or symbolic capital available to more established immigrants. Our findings contrast with other studies of religion that demonstrate the role of congregations in providing “spaces of sociability.” According to Nancy Ammerman, religious organizations (or congregations) are places of belonging, “where relationships of trust are formed, where a sense of identity is nurtured.” Moreover, while other voluntary organizations can serve as places of belonging, “belonging to a religious community has a moral weight not always granted to other memberships.” Similarly, Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozman, and Henry Brady argue that religious organizations are more effective than other voluntary organizations in facilitating the development of civic skills, and that those who develop civic skills in “an environment removed from politics” are likely to become politically competent. Finally, studies by Lois Lorentzen and Marie Marquardt demonstrate how congregations provide contexts for the development of civic skills and leadership, especially among women migrants. Our research in Immokalee challenges these findings. The religious organizations that we studied tend to reinforce ethnic, regional, and social divisions between immigrants. They facilitate bonding social capital among more established immigrants that is inward oriented, but tend to neglect bridging social capital. This is especially the case with the Pentecostal church. The Catholic church, on the other hand, is more effective at building bridges between it and other organizations and between its members and other groups but, like the Pentecostal church, is not very successful in generating bridging capital within the church. Churches, while an important source of social capital, appear to be ill-equipped to deal with the heterogeneity and high degree of mobility of Immokalee’s immigrant population. Additionally, most churches in Immokalee appear to be lacking the kind of leadership needed to establish relations with other churches and community organizations, relations that could in turn facilitate “links among communities that frequently coexist in relative isolation from one another.”

Evidence of Lived Religion Despite immigrants’ lower levels of participation in congregational life in Immokalee than in their communities of origin, we found plenty of evidence to

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TABLE 8.1

Frequency of Prayer among Immigrants in Immokalee How often do you pray?

%

Regularly

69.4

When having a problem

15.6

Almost never

9.5

Never

5.4

suggest that immigrants continue to draw on their religious beliefs and practices to navigate the challenges of everyday life in the workplace, at home, and in the streets. For example, almost  percent of respondents in our survey claimed to pray regularly (see table .). The results from our survey mirror those of a recent survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Hispanic Center. According to that survey,  percent of Hispanics who belong to a particular religion pray on a daily basis. Several of the immigrants that we interviewed emphasized the importance of prayer in facing the sometimes dangerous work conditions to which they are exposed. Daniel, a Seventh-Day Adventist from Chiapas, Mexico, related the importance of prayer at his workplace: “Yes, my boss taught us to say a prayer before going to work, after returning from work, because when one gets up one should entrust oneself to God. He guides us along our path so there are no misfortunes.” Similarly, Salvador, a farmworker from Oaxaca, relates: “Yes, sometimes I get up and entrust myself to God so that everything goes well at work, that a tree won’t fall on me, that I won’t get run over on the highway. These things I have to say to God so that he helps me to be able to survive here and that there are no disasters. . . . [I]n the fields many bad things can come to pass.” Many instances of lived religion take place in semi-public spaces that can serve both individual and communal religious practices. For example, home altars often function as private spaces for individual or family devotions but also bring together groups of devotos (devotees to saints) on special occasions to venerate saints. Otomí immigrants from Hidalgo, as discussed in chapter , celebrate baptisms and the Fiesta de Santa Teresa in these intermediate spaces, rather than in the streets or at church. Similarly, in an effort to build a sense of community beyond the Sunday services, lay leaders from the Bethel church organize prayer groups that meet in different members’ homes during the week. Members’ homes become semi-public spaces where los hermanos can gather to pray, sing, and study the Bible.

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Despite the lower level of participation in congregational life in Immokalee, previous connections to churches in the communities of origin appear to shape everyday religious practice in Immokalee. Such is the case of Marcelino, a migrant farmworker from an indigenous community in Tlatlauquitepec, Puebla. Marcelino is forty-five years old, married, and has eight children. Unable to support his family back in Puebla, he journeyed alone to the United States five years ago. He was recruited on the border to work in Immokalee, where he had no contacts or family. In addition to working in the tomato harvest in Immokalee, he has worked in the Carolinas, Kentucky, Virginia, and Maryland. Since arriving five years ago, Marcelino has returned home once to visit his family. Although Marcelino grew up Catholic he identifies more closely with a Pentecostal church back home. The influence of Pentecostalism is evident when he speaks of religious idols: “Here in Exodus  it says that one should not bow before idols made by man, because they can’t speak or listen. So I learned to respect them but not to worship them.” In Immokalee he never attends church and claims that God does not recognize any particular religion: “I know that there’s only one God and there’s only one God but without any religion.” Although he says he has no time to attend church in Immokalee, he sometimes finds a spare moment to read the Bible and to pray to God: “Well, yes, I sometimes pray. I don’t have a particular place, rather . . . when I’m sleeping and I ask God to support me, to take care of my family because I’m far away from my family. I ask Him to take care of us and I always put myself in God’s hands.” Marcelino maintains a direct relationship with God, unmediated by religious institutions. Moreover, when he needs help with a personal problem, he seeks advice from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers as opposed to religious organizations in town. Tránsito, from Altamirano, Guerrero, provides another example of religious practice unmediated by institutions. She is a forty-six-year-old single immigrant who arrived in Immokalee in . When she was sixteen she left home and went north to help her mother and twelve siblings. Over the years Tránsito has worked in the fields, sending money back to her family in Altamirano. Years after arriving, she helped some of her brothers to emigrate from Mexico. Today Tránsito works on and off in a storehouse packing tomatoes and oranges. Despite spending the better part of her life working en la labor, she has been unable to accumulate sufficient capital or property to ensure even a minimal level of economic security. Having lived in Immokalee over thirty years, Tránsito knows the different churches and the social services they provide. In fact, the day we met her she had just picked up some free clothing from the Catholic Charities office. As we walked with her, some members of the Baptist church greeted her. During our conversation, she mentioned that she had also visited the Bethel church. Nevertheless, she is not a regular member of any of these religious organizations. She sees organized religion as overly demanding and coercive and has not found personal or spiritual satisfaction in any church.

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Tránsito’s relationship with religious congregations goes beyond receiving social services and has played an important role during difficult phases of her life in Immokalee. Like Marcelino, Tránsito attended a Pentecostal church back in Mexico before emigrating. This was despite the fact that the rest of her family remained practicing Catholics. As a legacy of her childhood participation in a Pentecostal church, she learned how to relate to God without intermediaries. During our conversation, Tránsito recounted two important dialogues she sustained with God during serious emotional crises. In the first one, she asked: “God, do you exist or not? Why do you allow people like me to suffer so much? If I have worked all my life to support my mother and my family, isn’t it my turn to enjoy myself?” For several months Tránsito stopped believing in God, even attempting suicide. At that point she tried again to communicate with God. In her words, “I put myself in his hands. I asked him to give me light. I asked him to give me peace, and then I started to cry a lot, to sob for a long time. Afterwards, I felt a great sense of peace in my soul again.” Thus, despite an apparently instrumental relationship with religion, Tránsito’s ongoing dialogue with God has provided her with an important source of spiritual and emotional support during trying times. These examples of “believing without belonging” illustrate unique relationships with the sacred outside the realm of religious congregations and underscore the limited reach of churches among diverse and mobile populations. Marcelino and Tránsito found a solution to their spiritual needs without joining churches. Moreover, in Marcelino’s case, he has established an important link to a civic organization (the Coalition of Immokalee Workers) in town and has developed labor networks throughout the Atlantic coast. On the other hand, Tránsito, who has no family in town, has not developed strong ties to religious or civic organizations. Despite having worked in the United States for thirty years, Tránsito’s isolation from the usual sources of social capital has prevented her from accumulating wealth or achieving a modicum of economic security.

Popular Devotions and Public Religious Practice We found plenty of evidence that immigrants “worship particular saints or deities, or engage in informal, popular religious practices that affirm their continued attachments to a particular sending-country group or place.” Some immigrants entrust themselves to favored saints or virgins during their border crossings. María, a farmworker from Oaxaca, is a devotee of the Virgin of Juquila, a widely venerated virgin in the state of Oaxaca. When crossing the border into the United States, she prayed to the Virgin of Juquila, she said, “to help me, to stay with me in these difficult times, with no water, nothing to eat. We walked day and night through the cold, soaking rain, our clothes wet, hardly able to walk.” Rodolfo, an immigrant from Cortazar, Guanajuato, was brought up to

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TABLE 8.2

Religious Practices of Immigrants in Immokalee Immokalee

Mexico/Guatemala

% yes

% yes

Catholic Protestant

All

Catholic Protestant All

Made promises to a saint

34.0

0

24.3

51.0

4.5

38.5

Offered candles/ food to a saint

32.0

9.1

25.2

47.0

18.2

36.5

Cured miraculously

22.2

31.8

21.1

33.0

18.2

27.7

Participated in Mayan ceremony

8.0

9.1

6.8

8.2

13.6

8.2

Spoken in tongues

8.0

27.3

10.8

7.0

22.7

11.5

Been possessed

4.0

27.3

3.2

7.1

22.7

8.2

Practiced witchcraft

2.0

0

1.4

1.0

0

2.0

Religious conversion

6.0

27.3

10.8

8.0

13.6

11.5

venerate the popular Saint Padre Nieves. Much like a patron saint, his image is prominently displayed in homes throughout this region of Mexico. Rodolfo entrusted himself to Padre Nieves before crossing the border and recently asked his mother to send him an image of Padre Nieves to display in his room in Immokalee: “I asked her to send me an image of Padre Nieves, who the pope made a saint. In Cortazar, Guanajuato, there’s a cross where they killed him. I believe during that month they go on horseback to where they killed him. The priest at the church there also goes on horseback. My rancho is just before you get to Cortazar. The majority of people in my rancho have an image of Padre Nieves in their homes and stickers in their cars. Locally, Padre Nieves is almost as important as the Virgin.” Despite the continued importance of popular devotions, we discovered that many immigrants were less likely to engage in these practices in Immokalee than in their communities of origin (see table .). This was especially true of popular Catholic devotions that appear to be practiced less frequently in Immokalee than in immigrants’ communities of origin. Whereas as . percent of all respondents reported to have made promises to saints in their communities of origin, only . percent did in Immokalee. Similarly, . percent reported making

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offerings of food or candles to saints in Mexico/Guatemala but only . percent reported making such offerings in Immokalee. For Catholics, the contrast is even more striking. Whereas  percent of Catholics reported making promises to a saint in their communities of origin, only  percent reported doing so in Immokalee. Likewise,  percent of Catholics reported making offerings of food or candles to saints in Mexico/Guatemala, compared to  percent in Immokalee. There also appears to be significant differences between Catholics and Protestants. Whereas Protestants reported a lower frequency of popular devotions in Immokalee compared to Mexico/Guatemala, they reported significant increases in the frequency of having been cured miraculously, speaking in tongues, having been possessed, and of religious conversion in Immokalee compared to their communities of origin. However, given the small number of Protestant respondents in the sample (N ⫽ ), it is premature to draw too many conclusions from the data. When the Immokalee sample is combined with the sample from Jupiter, increasing the total number of Protestant respondents (N ⫽ ), the differences between Catholics and Protestants are less significant. As with the Immokalee sample, the combined sample shows a decrease in popular devotions among Protestants, but no change in the frequency of having been cured miraculously, a slight decrease in the frequency of having spoken in tongues (. percent in Guatemala/Mexico compared to . percent in Immokalee/Jupiter), a slight increase in the frequency of having been possessed (. percent compared to . percent in Immokalee/Jupiter), and a significant increase in religious conversion (. percent compared to . percent in Immokalee/Jupiter). This limited sample of Protestant respondents suggests that the most significant difference between Catholics and Protestants is in the changing frequency of experiencing religious conversion. Catholics appear to be less likely to experience religious conversion in the United States than in their home country, whereas Protestants are more likely to have conversion experiences in the United States. How do we explain these puzzling findings? As in the case of church attendance, it may be the case that some immigrants, especially Catholics, make a clear separation between their religious practice at home and in Immokalee. Also, given that the majority of migrant farmworkers are young, single males, they may not have been very well socialized into traditional religious practices back home. Even more significant may be the relationship between religion and space. As Orsi writes with regards to urban landscapes, “The spaces of the cities, their different topographies and demographics, are fundamental to the kinds of religious phenomena that emerge in them.” Despite the apparent portability of religion, transnational migrants sometimes face significant spatial obstacles to living and practicing their religion. Among recent and marginalized immigrants, deterritorialization takes the shape of dislocation and “ecological dissonance,” leading to what Karen McCarthy Brown has termed a “cosmo-logistical problem,” the problem of practicing religions that are tied to places when one

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is no longer in that place and when travel to that place can be difficult. The cosmo-logistical problem is heightened when sacred and public spaces are absent in the communities of settlement. In Mexico and Guatemala, the sacred is an integral part of the landscape and the religious calendar is closely linked to the agricultural cycle. Ancestral spirits inhabit hilltops and mountains throughout the countryside. Religious shrines dot the landscape, many of them intimately tied to natural features such as trees, streams, or caves. In sharp contrast, the rural landscape of southwest Florida with its endless extensions of orange groves and tomato fields is bereft of any recognizable sacred ecology. In Immokalee, Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants have to contend with the cultural and psychological implications of the very different spatial arrangements they encounter. Although less threatening than many large cities, Immokalee presents immigrants with few public spaces for social interaction. There are no town squares and few parks for recreation. Not surprisingly,  percent of respondents to our survey stated that they felt most comfortable “at home,”—only  percent chose public places. When asked what he did in his spare time, a farmworker from Guatemala responded: “Nothing. Take advantage of the day to rest, wash clothes. There’s nowhere to go for entertainment. Also it’s not safe to be walking around on the streets because immigration might pick us up. Generally, I don’t go out. Only if there’s a real need, otherwise no. Even if it’s really hot, it’s better to put up with the heat inside than to risk having problems.” The complete absence of public transportation, combined with the immigrants’ undocumented status, sharply circumscribes their circulation within and outside the town. On a typical weekday, farmworkers leave home early to walk to a designated pick-up place where old school buses take them to the fields. In the afternoon, they stop at a nearby store to buy food or beer on their way home. Some evenings they venture out to a money transfer agency or a public telephone along Main Street to make a call home. Those few immigrants who have time to pasear on the weekends are more likely to pay for a ride to Wal-Mart or the flea market la pulga (both of which are some twenty-five miles away) than to visit a public place in Immokalee. According to Michel de Certeau, the very act of walking can represent a clandestine “tactic” by groups or individuals to reappropriate space. It is a “spatial acting-out” of place, creating public space rather than being subjected to it. While it may be true that immigrants have carved out their own spaces where they feel comfortable to speak Spanish or to drink beer in store parking lots, Immokalee resembles a segmented “space of enclosure,” where farmworkers are isolated and subjected to constant supervision and surveillance by contractors and crew leaders. Labor contractors maintain their power over farmworkers through their ability to withhold services such as housing, job contracts, transportation, and wages, or to report them to immigration authorities. Moreover, labor contractors ensure that power is internalized through reciprocity—through

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the social debt placed upon the worker to remain loyal to a “benevolent” boss. Caught in these “nets of discipline,” immigrants’ ability to resist the spatialization of social control is much more limited than what de Certeau would suggest. These new spatial configurations are also evident in more private spheres such as living arrangements. Despite claiming to feel most comfortable at home, migrant farmworkers are often crammed into dilapidated trailers with eight to ten strangers. A farmworker from Chihuahua, Mexico, described having to share a room with six other farmworkers: “The living conditions are very cramped because we have to wait in line for the bathroom, wait in line to cook, wait in line to wash clothes. So I believe we’re too many people for one room; the conditions are deplorable, because in one small room we’re squeezing in too many people, dirty clothes, dirty socks. The conditions are not hygienic.” Unlike the case of Brazilians in Broward County (chapter ), for whom home is a powerful organizing trope, for Guatemalan and Mexican migrant farmworkers in Immokalee, home does not represent a domesticated space protecting them from the hostile world outside. It is often a space of alienation and sometimes conflict. Moreover, in their cramped living quarters, immigrants do not have their own personal spaces to construct home altars, hang religious images, or light candles to their preferred saints. This can present important obstacles to religious practice and undermine efforts to sacralize home. For example, in describing his living arrangements, a farmworker from San Pedro Xoconutla, Guatemala, related the following: “There [Guatemala] at home all the family gets together and puts our candlestick in the corner. We express what we feel, from the heart. It’s to ask [the spirits] to protect us, to guide us with good ideas and on a good path. I do this back home. But here I can’t because I live with a heap of people and can’t do anything. I bought my candlestick a little while ago and they kept putting it out and making fun of me. Because of this I stopped using it here. In my heart I hope the spirits will forgive me. I’m not giving it up because I want to, but because they won’t allow me.” Peggy Levitt refers to religion as “the ultimate border crosser.” Accordingly, “God needs no passport because faith traditions give their followers symbols, rituals, and stories they use to create alternative sacred landscapes, marked by holy sites, shrines, and places of worship.” However, the mobile livelihoods of farmworkers raise questions about the limits on the portability of religion. The experience of María, a farmworker from Oaxaca, is illustrative: “I don’t have any religious images because I rent; I move from one place to another; I don’t have any furniture. I’m living in the living room of this woman because where we live they’re all men. Now it’s difficult because I don’t have any way to move and because of this I don’t carry anything, but where I am now, as it’s the woman’s trailer, she has images of the Virgin of Guadalupe.” These examples highlight the serious spatial constraints limiting even the private devotions of migrant farmworkers, who sometimes have no place to

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hang their religious images and are often forced to share private living spaces with strangers. Public expressions of popular devotions, such as fiestas patronales, face even more difficult spatial obstacles. Unlike Guatemalans in Jupiter, immigrants in Immokalee find few opportunities to re-create images of home via popular religious practice. Just over a third (. percent) of those surveyed reported having attended a religious procession or fiesta. The Catholic church in Immokalee organizes a public procession in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe on December , but, according to informants, the procession is not very well attended (often times the procession falls on a weekday when most immigrants are working) and is a poor imitation of the celebrations organized throughout Mexico. The Catholic church also organizes a viacrucis (stations of the cross) during Holy Week. However, according to one farmworker, the viacrucis in Immokalee hardly compares with the procession in his hometown in Mexico: “During Holy Week we follow the entire journey that Jesus made . . . [and] we reproduce everything that happened to Jesus along the way. It’s something very different; here it’s nothing; it’s all work.” Uncertain access to public space is often a constraint on public religious practices. In the case of Holy Week, in  the parish priest, Father Ettore Rubin, proposed to organize the Good Friday procession on church grounds. His reasoning was the danger posed to participants from passing cars and the bureaucratic obstacles, including soliciting permission from county officials and the local police. Some of the more established immigrants, who make up the active lay leadership in the church, successfully lobbied Rubin to allow the procession to take place on the streets nearby the church. Although the procession began with only two hundred participants, more and more people joined in. By the time they arrived back at the church there were over two thousand in the procession. According to Father Rubin, this was the first time in his four years of ministry that the streets around the church had been converted into a sacred space. The temporary appropriation of the streets during the viacrucis contrasts with Latin America, where religion is regularly “performed” in the public spaces of streets and town squares. With the exception of Holy Week and the Virgin of Guadalupe celebration, we found few examples of public religious practice in Immokalee. Unlike Guatemalans in Jupiter, Mexican immigrants in Immokalee prefer to celebrate their fiestas patronales in their homes or to return to Mexico for the celebration. As described in chapter , immigrants from Chamácuaro, Guanajuato, return each year in May for the Fiesta de Santa Cruz. They are joined in Chamácuaro by immigrants from all over the United States. As demonstrated by a number of studies of Mexican migration, fiestas patronales constitute one of the most important mechanisms through which Mexican immigrants reaffirm their sense of belonging to their places of origin. The case of Chamácuaro and the example of the Otomís, discussed in chapter , resemble emerging transnational communities in that solidaristic ties

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“reach beyond narrow kinship systems” and encompass shared meanings and beliefs expressed in the form of collective identity. Emerging transnational communities can provide immigrants without access to social capital via religious organizations an alternative space through which to develop and deploy social and other forms of capital. Immigrants’ monetary contributions to the Fiesta de Santa Cruz in Chamácuaro or to community projects in their village in Hidalgo “can be deployed as status claims (and perhaps increased power), and translated into status through appropriate valorization” by their paisanos in Immokalee and in Mexico. However, given the increasingly restrictive border control policies, it is primarily immigrants con papeles who are able to participate in transnational activities that require travel back to Mexico. The absence of fiestas patronales in Immokalee may also have to do with the low levels of social capital and the ethnic/regional heterogeneity of immigrants. As discussed in chapter , compared to Guatemalans in Jupiter, who enjoy higher levels of social capital and ethnic/cultural homogeneity, immigrants in Immokalee face less discrimination and social exclusion in their everyday lives. Not surprisingly, in Immokalee we witnessed little of the reactive ethnicity that has emerged in Jupiter in response to the sometimes hostile reception on the part of the local community. Reactive ethnicity, in turn, provides the basis for greater collective solidarity and mobilization in defense of ethnic group interests. These are often expressed through popular religious practices—like the Fiesta Maya in Jupiter—that stake “a claim to living in a particular kind of nation.”

Conclusion “Immokalee es un desmadre” (Immokalee is a mess, screwed up). This was how an immigrant whom we spoke to during the final day of the fiesta in Chamácuaro, Mexico, described Immokalee, where he had spent three years off and on working in la labor. Comparing Immokalee to Windsor, California, where he works in a winería, he noted the absence of public spaces to pasear with his family during his days off in Immokalee. For many migrant farmworkers, who are passing through Immokalee on their way to another destination, Immokalee resembles the “non-places” described by French anthropologist Marc Augé. These “nonplaces” are bleak locales of contemporary modernity, “transit points and temporary abodes . . . proliferating under . . . inhuman conditions” and distinct from “anthropological places” that provide cultural identity and memory, which bind inhabitants to the history of locale. Unlike immigrants in traditional gateway cities, most immigrants do not come to Immokalee to make a home, to put down roots, to give meaning to the temporary locales that they inhabit. For the five to six months they are in Immokalee, they come to work, to earn dólares to send back home, and to one day return and reunite with their family.

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However, Augé may go too far in accentuating the alienating nature of nonplace. Even in his example of airport terminals (the ultimate non-places), for the permanent denizens (the baggage handlers, check-in clerks, security personnel, and janitors) the terminal “is clearly a ‘real’ place—their workplace.” Similarly, for the established immigrants who live and work in Immokalee in a permanent fashion, as pointed out in chapter , it as a very “real” place “with all the anthropological richness, . . . the subtleties of daily interpersonal contact, the friendships, rivalries and so on” that apply to any “anthropological” place. According to Manuel Castells, in the face of intense social dislocation and atomization, “people anchor themselves in places, and recall their historic memory.” This is because “when the world becomes too large to be controlled, social actors aim at shrinking it back to their size and reach.” Setha Low refers to this counter social force as “vernacularization”: “the process by which the global is made local through the attribution of meaning.” Whereas other scholars have emphasized the importance of religion in processes of vernacularization, our research in Immokalee shows that many immigrants do not draw on religion “to make their own space and find their own place.” Although churches do provide some limited social spaces to develop social networks that can be used to accumulate social capital, they tend to reinforce the disparities between established immigrants and migrant workers. Consequently, most immigrants do not look to churches in “the search for secure moorings in a shifting world.” Similarly, we found significant structural and spatial obstacles that inhibit immigrants from living and practicing their religion as they do in their communities of origin. Public religious practices, like fiestas patronales, that are so important to building a sense of place, are largely absent in Immokalee. Instead, much of the lived religion we found is practiced in intermediate, semi-public spaces, as in the examples of home altars and Pentecostal prayer groups. Although we do not presume to generalize from this single case, our findings do present us with a cautionary tale. Within the social sciences, for those of us who study the poor, there is a “propensity to romance the politically successful actors among the dispossessed” and to ignore “those who are not successful, not interested, or not aware.” Similarly, in studies of transnational migrants there is a tendency to assume transnationalism exists and less concern with explaining when it doesn’t. And in religious studies, the temptation is to focus on good religion only, thereby defining off the table the less savory dimensions of religion. Our findings challenge scholars of religion and migration to take seriously the religious practice and imagination of the poorest and most marginalized immigrants. Recalling the words of Edward R. Murrow, our study reminds us of the importance of not ignoring “the forgotten people,” the “migrant workers in the sweatshops of the soil.” They may not have built havens, let alone heavens, but they nonetheless deserve a place in our stories of new immigrant religions in the United States.

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We are grateful to Robert Orsi and Alejandro Frigerio for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter. . Stephen Warner, “Immigration and Religious Communities in the United States,” in Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration, ed. Stephen Warner and Judith Wittner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ), . . Raymond Williams, Religions of Immigrants from India and Pakistan: New Threads in the American Tapestry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Similarly, Thomas Tweed’s study of Cuban migrants in Miami found that they “turned to religion to make sense of themselves as a displaced people” and that religion, “both in churches and homes, took on increased significance for many Cubans in Miami.” Thomas Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . . See Warner and Wittner, Gatherings in Diaspora; and Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Salzman Chafetz, Religion and the New Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, ). In their recent study of religion and new immigrants in Washington, D.C., Foley and Hoge reject the term “congregation” in favor of “local worship communities.” They argue that the use of the term “congregation” implies a congregational template characteristic of American Protestant churches that “obscures important differences” between worship communities. Michael Foley and Dean Hoge, Religion and the New Immigrants: How Faith Communities Form Our Newest Citizens (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –. . Warner, “Immigration,” . . See Nancy Ammerman, Congregation and Community (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ); and Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). . The term “mobile livelihoods” underlines the fact that “livelihood practices quite commonly engage people in extensive movements at local, regional, national and transnational levels.” Karen Olwig, “Transnational’ Socio-Cultural Systems and Ethnographic Research: Views from an Extended Field Site,” International Immigration Review  (): . . See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ); and James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ). . Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), . This transformation of the place-culture relationship is often referred to as deterritorialization: “the weakening attachments to place, to territorially defined communities and cultures ranging from the household, the urban neighborhood, and the town or city, to the metropolis, the region, and the most powerful of contemporary territorial communities of identity, the modern nation-state.” Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –. . See Karen McCarthy Brown, “Staying Grounded in a High-Rise Building: Ecological Dissonance and Ritual Accommodation in Haitian Vodou,” in Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape, ed. Robert Orsi, – (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ); David Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); Robert Orsi, “Introduction: Crossing the City Line,” in Gods of the City, ed. Orsi; and Manuel Vásquez and Marie

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Marquardt, Globalizing the Sacred: Religion across the Americas (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ). . Robert Orsi “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in Lived Religion in America, ed. David Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . . Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . . Orsi, “Everyday Miracles,” . . We identified forty churches in town. . The Scalabrini Order was founded in Italy in the early s with the objective of accompanying Italian Catholics that emigrated to the Americas. Since its founding, the Scalabrini Order has dedicated its efforts to ministering and evangelizing to immigrants around the world. . Several scholars of Pentecostalism in Latin American have observed this phenomenon. For example, see Elizabeth Brusco, The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia (Austin: University of Texas Press, ); John Burdick, Looking for God in Brazil: The Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil’s Religious Arena (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); and Andrew Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ). . Bourdieu and Waqcuant define social capital as “the sum of resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.” Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . . Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, ). . The other side of coercion and social control is protection, stability, and a strong sense of belonging for those who find refuge from life’s afflictions within the protective walls of the church. . Peggy Levitt, “You Know, Abraham Was Really the First Immigrant: Religion and Transnational Migration,” International Immigration Review  (): . . The term refers to the “stresses and ambiguities,” generated by social, economic, and cultural factors at the group, family, and individual levels, that lead to multiple forms of exclusion. James Vigil, Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity in Southern California (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), . . As Menjívar’s study of Salvadoran immigrants in San Francisco demonstrates, “social capital cannot be generated automatically when immigrants do not have access to desirable resources, because reciprocal obligations are undermined under these conditions.” Cecilia Menjívar, Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . . Ammerman, Congregation, . . Ibid. . Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, Voice and Equality, . . Lois Lorentzen, “El milagro está en casa: Gender and Private/Public Empowerment in a Migrant Pentecostal Church,” Latin American Perspectives , no.  (): –; Marie Marquardt, “From Shame to Confidence: Gender, Religious Conversion, and Civic Engagement of Mexicans in the U.S. South,” Latin American Perspectives , no.  (): –. . According to Putnam, bridging social capital is outward looking and encompasses people “across diverse social cleavages.” Putnam, Bowling Alone, .

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. In their study of religion and new immigrants in Washington, D.C., Foley and Hoge also found “that worship communities vary both in the civic skills cultivated and in the degree to which these might transfer to actual participation in the political system.” Whereas Protestant evangelical churches “rarely encouraged their members to exercise these skills outside the worship community, Catholic parishes “promoted widespread participation among parishioners, volunteering outside the community, and civic activism.” Foley and Hoge, Religion and the New Immigrants, . . Richard Wood, Faith in Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . . See the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Hispanic Center, Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, ). . This is the subtitle of Grace Davie’s book on religion in Britain during the postwar period. Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since : Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, ). According to Davie, increasing numbers of postwar Britons no longer look to organized religion to satisfy their spiritual needs. Wade Clark Roof and Robert Wuthnow have documented similar trends in the United States. Roof refers to this phenomenon as a “quest culture” and Wuthnow argues that American culture has experienced a move from a “spirituality of dwelling” to a “spirituality of seeking.” Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); and Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). . Levitt, “You Know, Abraham,” . . Elias del Socorro Nieves was a Augustinian priest in the Cortazar region of Guanajuato. He was executed by Mexican troops during the Cristero Rebellion and beatified by Pope John Paul II in . . There was no significant difference between men and women. . This may suggest that Protestant churches in Immokalee are more successful in eliminating popular devotions associated with folk Catholicism than churches in Guatemala and Mexico. . Orsi, “Introduction: Crossing the City Line,” . . Brown, “Staying Grounded in a High-Rise Building,” –. . Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, ) . Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, ). . Peggy Levitt, God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape (New York: New Press, ), . . Ibid., –. . Father Rubin’s reaction to the Holy Week procession underlines the importance of religious leadership (of lack thereof in this case), not just structural factors. We thank Alex Stepick for this insight. . Chamácuaro is located in the municipal district of Acámbaro. The town has a population of approximately fifty-five hundred inhabitants. Residents have been migrating to the United States since the early s, and significant communities can be found in Illinois, northern California, and Georgia. . See Jorge Durand, Mas allá de la línea. Patrones migratorios entre México y Estados Unidos (México, DF: Conaculta, ); Víctor Espinosa, “El día del emigrante y el retorno del purgatorio: Iglesia, migración a los Estados Unidos y cambio sociocultural en un pueblo de los Altos de Jalisco,” Estudios Sociológicos  (): –; and Mónica Gendreau and Gilberto Giménez, “La migración internacional desde una perspectiva

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sociocultural: Estudio en comunidades tradicionales del centro de México,” Migraciones Internacionales  (): –. . Thomas Faist, “Transnationalization in International Migration: Implications for the Study of Citizenship and Culture,” Ethnic and Racial Studies , no.  (): . . Luin

Goldring,

“The

Power

of

Status

in

Transnational

Social

Fields,”

in

Transnationalism from Below, ed. Michael P. Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, ), . See Brettell for a similar discussion of how Portuguese immigrants in France convert their economic success abroad into social prestige back home. Caroline Brettel, Anthropology and Migration: Essays on Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and Identity (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, ). . According to Portes and Rumbaut, “reactive ethnicity is the product of confrontation with an adverse native mainstream and the rise of defensive identities and solidarities to counter it.” Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . . Orsi, “Introduction: Crossing the City Line,” . . Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, ). . Ibid., . . John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . . Ibid. . Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, ), . . Ibid. . Setha Low, On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), . . Thomas Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . . David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), . . Matthew Gutmann, The Romance of Democracy: Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), xxiii. . Edward R Murrow, Harvest of Shame (New York: Ambrose Video, CBS Broadcast International, ).

9 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Brazilian and Mexican Women Interacting with God in Florida PATRICIA FORTUNY LORET DE MOLA, LÚCIA RIBEIRO, AND MIRIAN SOLÍS LIZAMA

This chapter analyzes the relationship between lived religion, gender, and migration in South Florida. Few studies examine this tripartite relationship, as analyses of female migration normally emphasize social processes related to labor markets. Even those studies that explore changes in gender roles, conceptions of femininity and masculinity, and family life that result from the process of migration tend to privilege the economic variable and ignore religion altogether. For example, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila offer a very nuanced analysis of “transnational motherhood,” showing how the meaning of motherhood changes for Latinas who have left their children behind, in their countries of origin, to work as nannies for American children. According to them, “transnational mothers seek to mesh caregiving and guidance with breadwinning. While breadwinning may require long-term and long-distance separations from their children, they attempt to sustain family connections by showing emotional ties through letters, phone calls, and money sent home.” Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila, however, do not examine the role of religion in the attempts by transnational mothers to deal with the alienation and anxiety of family separation and to maintain emotional, moral, and spiritual connections with the children in their sending countries. Building on and going beyond previous studies, we highlight the cultural dimensions of gender that contribute to the creation of social differences among people. Because we see male-female distinctions as human constructs, which are produced and reproduced through ideologies and cultural practices, we argue that it is crucial to understand the multiple roles that religion plays in the formation of fluid and contested gender identities, relationships, and ideologies. After all, despite increasing secularization, religion continues to be one of the most significant frames of reference for Mexican and Brazilian women. Our objective is to analyze how gender and the power relations that exist among 190

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immigrants are expressed through religious practice in a specific migratory context. As discussed in chapter , we adopt Robert Orsi’s concept of “lived religion” that focuses on the formation of the self in “an ongoing, dynamic relationship with the realities of everyday life.” In this manner, we avoid reproducing the patriarchal view of religion, which assumes that power, authority, and legitimacy are located exclusively at the apex of religious structures. Rather, power and resistance flow through them, from top to bottom and vice versa. Stressing only the patriarchal dimension of religion denies women’s agency within the religious sphere. As Orsi emphasizes, “theological practice cannot be gridded in any simple way along the axis of ‘elite’ and ‘popular.’ ” Rather, religion “is shaped and experienced in the interplay among venues of everyday experience.” The narratives we collected among immigrant women constantly reveal relations of subordination, resistance, and negotiation with men in family settings, in churches, and beyond. Men are present in women’s narratives as social actors that women respond to and interact with through opposition or subordination, according to the circumstances. Immigrants exercise power in the religious, social, and economic domains. As many studies show, immigrant women often take advantage of the American multicultural environment—with its new and different opportunities—to develop an increased awareness of gender and a capacity to resist systemic inequality. As Patricia Pessar writes, “Many scholars have examined the impact that immigrant women’s regular wage work has on gendered relations. A review of this literature points to the fact that despite gender inequalities in the labor market and workplace, immigrant women employed in the United States generally gain greater personal autonomy and independence, whereas men lose ground” (emphasis added). This presents a contradiction: immigrant women are perceived, and perceive themselves, to occupy a situation of social, cultural, economic, and political disadvantage and a subordinate position simply because they are women. In the United States, however, women discover socioeconomic opportunities not available in their homelands. Pessar argues that “a gendered perspective . . . encourages an examination of the ways in which migration simultaneously reinforces and challenges patriarchy in its multiple forms” (emphasis added). For our purpose of comparing and contrasting immigrant women’s experiences, we chose two immigrant groups in Florida: Brazilians in Deerfield Beach and Pompano Beach and Mexicans in Immokalee. The first important difference between these groups of women is income: most Brazilian women earn between $, and $, per month, while only  percent of Mexican immigrant women in Immokalee earn $, to $, monthly. This disparity reflects the fact that  percent of Mexican immigrants (men and women) work in agriculture, while the majority of Brazilians work in the service sector. Some  percent of Mexican women work in the fields or packing plants. The other  percent

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(fourteen in our sample) are in domestic service, the service sector, or are unemployed. Of the Brazilian women surveyed, . percent work in low-skilled service sector jobs like housecleaning and domestic service, . percent have secretarial positions or are merchants or saleswomen, while a small minority (. percent) attained a higher technical level, and . percent went to a university and aspire to professional positions. Estimates indicate that the number of Brazilian men and women immigrants is about equal, while we found that only  percent of Mexican immigrants in Immokalee are women. Immokalee presents a number of employment opportunities for Mexican immigrant women. Though they often earn less than men, by holding jobs they acquire greater freedom and autonomy from family and spouse. With their earnings, women are free to go out and spend their time and money as they please and can save money to invest in modest businesses to increase their capital. Similarly, for Brazilian immigrant women employment means more economic and social autonomy, though most suffer downward social mobility because their occupational and educational qualifications exceed the requirements of their jobs. Although immigration tends to have a negative impact on Brazilian women’s social mobility, it is generally positive for the mostly rural, low-skilled Mexican immigrant women. Given this context, we will examine how religion shapes and is shaped by () participation in organizations, () everyday individual practices inside and outside institutions, () practices in intermediate spaces, and () religious faith as a source of personal empowerment. In the first section we discuss the extent to which immigrants’ socialization in their countries of origin predisposes them to certain kinds of religious behavior in their new destinations, and the relationship between their socialization and cultural constructions of gender. The second section examines the dialectical relation between the migratory condition and lived religion, given that people’s social circumstances influence and are influenced by the religious sphere. The third section reveals how lived religion infuses private spaces with sacred landscapes, showing that lived religion does not necessarily require sacred objects or spaces to flourish. In the final section, we analyze how lived religion, though derived from religious institutions, is often practiced in “in-between” social spaces where sacred power flows and is appropriated by spiritual leaders. This is a novel approach that avoids dualist conceptualizations of private/public space by focusing on intermediate domains that often exist in religious institutions but have been rarely studied from a gender theoretical perspective.

Relocating Lived Religion from Place of Origin to New Destinations Religious diversity has increased markedly in Mexico over the past thirty years: the percentage of the population that does not profess Roman Catholicism rose

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from . percent in  to . percent in , while the percentage of Catholics fell from . percent to . percent. These indices vary widely in different regions. For example, in , some states in western Mexico (Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacán, Zacatecas, Durango, San Luis Potosí) had a Catholic population of . percent,  percentage points above the national average, with indices of evangelicals and Protestants of only . percent against a national mean of . percent. However, a survey from Immokalee in  suggests that immigrants from western Mexican states are . percent Catholic and . percent evangelical/Protestant. In contrast, census data from southeastern Mexico (Chiapas, Oaxaca, Veracruz) show Catholic and Protestant populations of . percent and . percent, respectively. In Immokalee, our survey of immigrants from those Mexican states found that . percent were Catholic and . percent were Protestant. A bastion of Catholicism and resistance to evangelical conversion, western Mexico has a migratory tradition that stretches back over one hundred years. The Fiesta de la Santa Cruz in Chamácuaro, Guanajuato (see chapter ), illustrates the strength of traditional Catholicism. Women’s behavior during the fiesta reflects subordination and the reproduction of “feminine” roles. Though they are clearly more devout than men, on the main festival day (May ) women must first do their domestic chores, even if—as sometimes happens—they miss the rituals. In this context, religious doctrine leads them to accept their inferior position—cultural baggage they take with them when they migrate. In women’s desire to see themselves as autonomous actors, we detect the influence of religious norms on their daily lives. As Florencia, a sixty-four-year-old Catholic from Cristero Territory and a first-generation immigrant who arrived in Immokalee in the s, observes: My grandmother was abused and humiliated. . . . [S]he cried and implored God. She inculcated that faith in us, devotion to the Virgin, to God. I followed my grandmother the most, to Rosary every day. I taught my brothers and sisters the good manners and ways I learned from my mother and grandmother, who taught me to always turn to God, fear God, and love God. I worked in the fields; we suffered a lot because my father, rest in peace, liked to drink. We suffered from domestic violence; my mother would end up bathed in blood and when I defended her he’d hit me too. All my life I worked picking tomatoes, oranges, peppers. . . . When I picked oranges my husband took my check. I worked more than him but he had no compassion [emphasis added].

In Florida’s agricultural fields, women like Florencia work alongside men, but this labor status has no apparent effect on gender relations. Women must still fulfill their double duty at home and are under constant male domination. The traditional, conservative Catholicism they bring with them from Mexico

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provides the ideological foundation on which the “resignation” of many women rests. Nevertheless, analyses of gender must go beyond simply documenting women’s submission and demonstrate, as Elizabeth Juárez Cerdi suggests, their capacity to resist and contravene social and religious norms. Though Florencia was dominated by her father and then her husband, she achieved some economic independence that allowed her to leave her spouse and his abuse. Upon arriving in Immokalee, she picked tomatoes, eventually becoming a pintera, and accumulated some capital. She opened a fruit stand in a flea market that continues to be very profitable. A few years ago, she bought a lot where she lives comfortably in her own house. Her son studied architecture at the University of Houston in Texas, and she still works at the market every weekend. To explain the social and economic progress such women achieve, we must examine individual agency and the structural conditions of global capitalism in immigrant destinations, which differ from those in their places of origin and contribute to attaining female autonomy. In the United States, women like Florencia do not renounce their conservative Catholicism, but reinterpret their inherited religion and abandon certain attitudes (resignation) that form part of female codes of conduct. They may also adopt new forms of behavior. In Brazil, as in Mexico, the religious field is becoming increasingly diverse. First, the relative number of Catholics is declining: the  census shows . percent Catholics, . percent less than in . Second, evangelicals have increased to . percent, over two-thirds of them Pentecostals. Third, more people declare “no religious affiliation”; though a small minority (. percent), this sector shows the highest relative rate of growth since . As in Mexico, change in Brazil varies among regions. In Minas Gerais (origin of . percent of the immigrant women we interviewed), the proportion of Catholics is . percent, while evangelicals represent . percent. In Río de Janeiro, home to . percent of the women surveyed, the gap narrows: . percent Catholic versus . percent evangelical. In São Paulo (. percent of immigrants), . percent are Catholic and . percent are evangelical. Finally, in Goiás (. percent of immigrants) . percent are Catholic and . percent are evangelical. In contrast to the predominance of Catholicism in Brazil, among Brazilian immigrants evangelicalism seems to prevail and this is reflected in the type of Brazilian churches we found in Florida. Of thirty-nine religious organizations, Brazilian Catholics congregate in a single church: Nossa Senhora Aparecida. As described by José Claúdio Souza Alves in chapter , the great majority of the other religious congregations are evangelical Protestant, either Pentecostal

or

neo-Pentecostal.

This

distribution

reflects

a

growing



This ten-

Protestantization and Pentecostalization of Brazilian Christianity.

dency may be accelerated by the processes of migration. Perhaps the loss of everyday support networks in the process of migration, together with the large size and impersonal nature of the Catholic parish, encourages Brazilians abroad

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to search for small, highly affective groups—the hallmark of Pentecostalism and charismatic Catholicism—in which they can reconstruct their intimacy. Manuel Vásquez documented this quest for protective interpersonal networks in chapter , but more research needs to be done to understand the prevalence of Protestantism among Brazilian immigrants. Angela provides a good example of how Brazilian women draw from religion to negotiate the processes of immigration. She is married with two children. To avoid a family separation, in  she migrated with her businessman husband and children to the United States. However, she felt unhappy with her subordinate role and redefined her new situation in the following terms: “I’ll put myself in God’s hands. I won’t live in the U.S. because it’s my husband’s plan; I’ll only stay if I feel it’s His plan” (emphasis added). Angela transferred the power that her husband exercised over her to God and felt she had a “mission” to fulfill. Her loss of social status and her role as a subordinate wife were accentuated because she had to give up her profession (psychologist) and devote herself to home and family, but she made use of her psychology background to do volunteer work with Brazilian immigrants: “When I arrived, M. took us right to the church, saying, ‘There’s a prayer group today, so you can see what it’s like.’ The priest knew we’d worked with couples’ groups in Brazil and wanted to organize a meeting, so two months later we organized the first meeting [there]. Being a psychologist helped a lot. I knew that many people needed help, and I had time to spare and knew what to do, so I went. People looked for me and we’d meet in the priest’s little office in the church” (emphasis added). Despite her recent arrival, Angela soon joined a prayer group, helped organize the Encontro de Casais com Cristo (Marriage Encounter with Christ) movement, and taught catechism; but what really marked her experience was her discovery of the charismatic movement outside Brazil: “I think Jesus wants me to do more. . . . It’s a call to devote myself more to the church, to community service, even if it means giving up my profession. I came here to work for God. Now they called me to work as a pastor. I’m very happy in the group and really committed. The group’s real strong and God’s presence is unique; you can’t just be a spectator there. They introduced me to a Jesus not imprisoned on a cross, but who literally acts in your life because you feel that he talks to you” (emphasis added). This opportunity provided Angela with a space of empowerment, not just in the movement, but in the wider Catholic community. She perceives her intense involvement in Catholic groups as a “sacred mission” that gives meaning and transcendence to her new life as an immigrant. The loss of social status she suffered is no longer a negative attribute because it is legitimized by the mission Christ conferred upon her. Though unable to practice as a psychologist, her profession constitutes a form of social and cultural capital that, combined with her experience in group work, brings her added social prestige as a charismatic leader.

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As the cases of Florencia and Angela show, immigrant women carry religious beliefs and practices with them, reinvent them in their new destinations, and live according to their precepts. This reinvention of their religiosity, however, rests on various sociocultural and economic factors linked to their personal biographies. As Florencia recounted, religion can strengthen and empower women to face adversity; but, as Angela explained, it is sometimes a balm that softens the impact of migration by giving women a “sacred mission.” Nevertheless, there is a difference of degree in the religious conduct of Mexican and Brazilian women. Florencia’s religious socialization in Mexico and her rural, peasant origins did not include experience with formal Catholic groups and limited her participation in groups in Florida because of her lack of free time. For Florencia, the years she spent in agricultural work were her only option for survival, though it meant that participating in a religious group was a luxury. Angela, in contrast, was able to participate in religious groups in Brazil and Florida. Being from a professional social class, her sociocultural resources bestowed certain advantages in Florida, such as free time and her husband’s financial support. These social, cultural, and economic factors interact in the migrant context to predispose and/or condition women to behave in certain ways with respect to religion.

Dialectics of Migration and Lived Religion Lived religion is not practiced in isolation but is embodied in social contexts. Thus, the migratory condition is a central factor in understanding the religious behavior of Brazilians and Mexicans in Florida. Conversely, belief affects immigrants’ behavior in a dialectical relationship. In the previous chapter, Philip Williams and Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola identified structural and spatial obstacles in receiving communities that can limit or condition lived religion. As a result, immigrants—especially recently arrived Catholic migrants—are less likely to practice popular devotions in Immokalee than in their communities of origin. However, as Paul Freston observes, there is no mechanical relationship between religious experience and migratory status. For immigrants, religious experience may intensify as a form of cultural defense or, on the contrary, be diminished by the influence of the more secular context or built environment that impedes its realization, as in the case of Immokalee. As was discussed in chapter , migratory status in Immokalee affects people’s religious behavior. Established immigrants, who arrived ten or more years ago, enjoy greater social and economic stability and participate more actively in churches, while recently arrived migrants (five years or less) participate little or not at all in churches. Religion seems to fulfill different functions for established and recent immigrants. Participation in officially sanctioned religious practices may permeate the lives of the former, as they have the time, social

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networks, and socioeconomic stability that allow them to devote themselves to religious activities. Amalia, an established immigrant from Tamaulipas, Mexico, arrived in Immokalee with her husband, Fernando, in . She discussed her active participation in the Catholic Church: “When I was a girl back home, I’d run to Rosary every afternoon and, as soon as I finished my chores, I’d go to church. [Here] I rose as high as Eucharistic minister, but had to pass through several stages, because this doesn’t happen overnight. . . . [M]y husband also studied for the ministry. I’ve participated in prayer groups, with charismatic nuns and in cursillos de cristiandad. My husband, Fernando, belongs to Knights of Columbus. . . . [T]hey hold weekly meetings at the church.” Amalia’s words reflect a more equitable relationship with her husband than Florencia’s narrative of frequent confrontations and violence. Fernando, Amalia’s partner, is not an oppressive, abusive spouse. Together they strive to become committed Catholics and to improve their socioeconomic status. While Amalia worked in the fields, then in nurseries, a local company hired Fernando as a tractor operator. With their combined incomes, they are paying off a mobile home that they furnished with Amalia’s savings, though she recently retired. In , they celebrated their younger daughter’s quiceañera with a lavish party that cost them a substantial amount of money but reaffirmed and widened their local social networks, displayed their socioeconomic achievements, and reinforced their status as good Catholics, respected citizens, and successful immigrants. Instead of becoming more involved in the Catholic church like Amalia, recently arrived migrant farmworkers generally limit their participation to attending Sunday Mass or may simply avoid churches altogether. For many, this is unavoidable as their working conditions leave no time for religion and they lack the resources (social and economic capital) to celebrate rites of passage like baptisms, weddings, and quinceañeras. This is the case of Magdalena, a young mother from Miahuatlán, Oaxaca, who arrived in Immokalee in  and immediately found work picking tomatoes: “I go to Mass on Saturdays, sometimes every other Saturday, because sometimes I get home late from work, need to give my son a bath, and there’s no time. At home I went to Mass every Sunday, but work’s hard here and women may work even more than men. . . . [My husband] wastes his time drinking, gambling . . . . but I have the same right. What I earn is for me, to make sure my son and I do okay” (emphasis added). Recent immigrants like Magdalena must work to survive and satisfy their daily needs before turning their attention to God. Though interested in religion, their material conditions oblige them to accept wage work that provides them with the minimal resources needed to attain relative independence from men. As Pessar has observed, even though women’s wage work does not always lead to men’s greater contribution to household sustenance—as in Magdalena’s case—men are no longer able to dominate women who have access to social and economic resources beyond the domestic sphere.

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Among Brazilian women there is no clear distinction between established and recent immigrants. Brazilian migration to South Florida is a much newer phenomenon, so differences in religious involvement are not as clear as in the case of Mexican immigrants. However, other factors may predispose immigrants toward, or away from, religion. Among the first are the search for support and references that are so important for them. Religion provides resources that reassure immigrants and help them adapt to the confusion and alienation caused by their uprooting. Our interviews revealed that many Brazilian immigrant women in Florida intensify their religious activities, finding support and solidarity among their fellow women. Also, when discussing their migratory condition, their religious beliefs often replace other life references: “When you’re a migrant in a country that’s not yours, [you] feel that God’s [presence] gets stronger. You need a support base when you’re outside your country. Life here is different, the culture’s different, everything’s different, and you need a point of reference” (emphasis added). Religious conversion often releases intense emotions, as we found among some Brazilians with little religious experience in their homeland, who, once alone in a foreign country, sought new frames of reference. Teresa noted: “When you reach the Miami airport, you’re obliged to meet Jesus. It’s like you’re more sensitive because you’re exposed . . . . fragile. They took me to see Jesus and I became devoted to Him right away. That was one of the most important things that happened to me [there]; it changed my view. Before, my only priority was me; now I’m still number one (because I’m God’s child) but my priorities changed. Once I found Jesus I decided to make the place I live the best place in the world” (emphasis added). Teresa believes that her “encounter with Jesus” gives meaning to the uncertain and confusing conditions of migration. To explain the many sacrifices made to survive in a foreign country, she adopts a theodicy that makes sense of new, adverse circumstances under the protection of a closer, more visible God who provides the emotional stability that immigrants may lose. Examples from Brazil and Mexico show that the relationship between the migratory condition and religious behavior is unpredictable. In places like Immokalee, working and living conditions often impede religious practice, especially for newly arrived women who are obliged to work in agriculture. Though they arrived later, Brazilian immigrant women have better jobs and a higher standard of living than Mexicans. These social advantages create conditions that favor—but do not determine—increased religious participation in the receiving community. Although the religious practices of established Mexican immigrants like Amalia are similar to those of Brazilian women, the reasons are different. First, Brazilians enjoy greater economic, social, and political stability than established Mexican immigrants do; and, second, religion allows Brazilian immigrants to legitimize their new material conditions, while the church provides a support base amidst the uncertainty of a foreign land. Churches serve as intermediaries

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between society and Brazilian believers, facilitating a smoother adaptation to the country of settlement. In contrast, established Mexican immigrants like Amalia turn to religion for other reasons, not necessarily related to their migrant condition, which they have largely overcome. As Marie Marquardt suggests, they join churches because they find opportunities for personal development and to broaden their social networks and elevate their social status. This, in turn, allows immigrant women to exercise power and attain authority and autonomy in private and public domains, like the progressive Catholics that Anna Peterson studied in El Salvador: “For many [women], the church mediates between private life at home and the larger, public realm of work and community participation.”

Lived Religion Everywhere in Everyday Life Religious practice cannot be reduced to official rituals held in institutional spaces; it is present in people’s daily lives (lived experience) and permeates both intimate, private domains and public spheres shared by believers. Angela, the Brazilian immigrant discussed earlier and in chapter 2, illustrates the presence and meaning of the sacred in daily life. Upon placing herself in God’s hands she felt supported and received signs that confirmed her decision to migrate, though she did so to accompany her spouse: “Before entering the house where we were going to live, I prayed Our Father and Ave María, asking Mary to bless and protect us. When I went in it was empty except for two images of the Virgin and a cross that said, ‘My home and I will always serve the Lord.’ ‘Hadn’t I asked Him for a sign?’ He said, ‘I chose this house for you. You came because I need you; you came to serve me.’ One image is in the same place (the kid’s bathroom), the other in the garage with the cross; I left them that way. ‘Hadn’t I asked for a sign? That’s why I say I came for God’ ” (emphasis added). Her trust in God helps Angela face life’s challenges and even the forces of nature. As a hurricane neared, she prayed for God’s protection and seemed to hear a voice that said, “No wind will touch your window.” The hurricane veered away and missed her home. She said, “If you really live something . . . not just attend Mass, but really internalize it as integral to your life, . . . you live your [whole] life differently.” Angela expresses the importance of closeness to God, not just paying lip service to a doctrine but in her total existence, suggesting that religiosity is central to an immigrant’s fate. Like Angela, Florencia is close to her Catholic faith and church, attending Mass every weekend and collaborating when asked to do so. Her faith and devotion often emerge in everyday conversation and actions: “What’s important is to put everything in God’s hands.” Florencia’s devotion epitomizes religion-in-action linked to daily life. At home, for example, she has various altars with images of the Virgin and she often supports Catholic organizations in Florida and, in return, receives numerous gifts that nurture her spirituality. In December , she went to Europe with her son and grandson,

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visited St. Peter’s Basilica, and attended Pope John Paul II’s dawn Mass. Clearly moved, she said, “I saw the pope close up. . . . He looked right at me and gave me his blessing.” These believers’ life experiences demonstrate that religion-in-action “cannot be separated from other practices of everyday life.” Angela finds in her religious practice a satisfactory explanation for her new role as a Brazilian immigrant in a hostile place. Her renewed, re-legitimized faith has been key to adapting to Florida, where she often sees “signs” from God. Florencia’s faith is so pervasive that it filters into her “spaces of recreation,” like her religious tourism in Europe, where her personal devotion became public when shared with thousands of other believers at the Vatican.

Lived Religion Outside of Institutions The cases of Tránsito (Mexican) and Antonia (Brazilian), who “believe without belonging,” reveal other ways of relating to the sacred. Their lack of commitment and participation in churches is due to their dissatisfaction with dogma and practice. This process—religious de-institutionalization—has been studied in Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and elsewhere in the guise of greater adherence to religious forms that do not require membership in an organized church but that modify beliefs and practices to re-create or reinvent their own symbolic universe. Regina Novaes writes that there are more “religious people without religion,” meaning individuals who seek “symbols and beliefs in diverse spaces and spiritual traditions to weave their personal religious synthesis.” Tránsito, introduced in chapter , is from rural Mexico. Though born a Catholic, she attended a small Pentecostal church for a time. Now a fortysix-year-old single woman, she arrived to Immokalee in , leaving home at the age of sixteen to help support her mother and twelve siblings. She always worked in agriculture and sent money home, but has never been able to accumulate her own savings. Today, she works part-time at a warehouse packing tomatoes and oranges, but her time in Immokalee has not been rewarded: despite thirty years of hard agricultural labor, she has neither the economic stability nor the legal status needed to enjoy a better quality of life. Though she knows the area’s churches (Catholic, Baptist, Pentecostal) and their social services, she is not a member of any. She says, “Being in a church is the same as having a job” (Estar en una iglesia es como tener un trabajo). For her, organized religion is too demanding and coercive. She finds no personal or spiritual satisfaction in church but maintains a personal relationship with God by praying alone. Like Tránsito, Antonia is an independent believer. In Brazil, she lived with her parents in stable economic conditions. She started to work at seventeen, studied psychology, and began a professional career in a psychiatric hospital, but in , the poor pay spurred her to emigrate to the United States in search

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of independence. “My reason wasn’t to save money. The problem was . . . I was twenty-nine and fed up with my parents supporting me. I didn’t want to live at home anymore; I wanted to be on my own” (emphasis added). Upon arriving in Florida she worked hard in restaurants and cleaning houses. Although she still works sixty-five to seventy hours a week as a waitress in a Brazilian diner, she has achieved the autonomy she desired: “Here, I have my own house, my car, pay my bills, my insurance, do what I want, go out with whoever I want.” The diner where Antonia works serves more Brazilian evangelicals than Catholics, but she prefers not to talk about religion with the former to avoid their attempts to convert her: “You [feign interest] and don’t talk about religions. I don’t like any religion here. To me, ‘believers’ [evangelicals] are false and hypocritical. . . . [T]hey say, ‘Jesus gave me a car.’ Well, I’m sorry, but if you don’t work then Jesus ain’t givin’ nobody nothing. I believe strongly in God, . . . in Jesus. But I think it’s work that pays. God helps those who help themselves. People say, ‘Hi brother. Christ’s peace. God’s peace,’ then sit down and start in: ‘Remember X . . .’ They talk badly about people. Is that religion? My view is different. . . . [T]he question of religion here is really complicated. I don’t like the church” (emphasis added). Antonia’s family is Catholic and she always attended Catholic schools, but today she considers herself a Baiana Catholic with a syncretic religiosity. “I go to the [Catholic church] once a year, or when I feel like it, but I don’t want commitments. I like a macumba [an African-based religion] . . . playing búzios  . . . lots of things. . . . [I]f it catches my eye, I’m into it.” Though re-created in the present, Tránsito’s and Antonia’s religious preferences derive from their countries’ religious cultures and the socialization they received when young. Their life stories illustrate their social class differences and the factors and motivations that lead them to approach the sacred independently. While Antonia went north looking for the personal growth she could not find in Brazil, Tránsito left home for reasons of survival, her own and that of her family. Tránsito’s instrumental relationship with churches reflects her precarious social position, while Antonia requires no material support from churches because her income gives her relative economic and social autonomy. Both are critical of churches: Tránsito accepts material benefits from them, but rejects them as places of worship; Antonia disapproves of evangelical behavior and reaffirms her faith through secular work rather than through God’s “goodwill.” For distinct reasons, both refuse to belong to a religious organization, but each maintains her faith in her own way.

Lived Religion in “In-Between” Spaces The tension between institutional affiliation and practices and lived religion is not always sharp. Churches create social spaces to reproduce and/or propagate

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their religious beliefs and doctrine. These include the cells  of some Pentecostal churches and Catholic prayer groups like Encontro de Casais com Cristo (Marriage Encounter with Christ), where believers meet in homes or other places outside of church. They are examples of “in-between” or intermediate spaces, where believers exercise authority and power, precisely because they operate outside institutional limits, though with the support or authorization of a religious organization. Through their religious commitments and activities, immigrant women gather knowledge and information that they turn into human and social capital and may use to obtain positions of authority, recognition, or respect both within and outside of their religious communities. María, a Pentecostal convert from northern Mexico, illustrates the positions of authority that believers can achieve through intermediate spaces. She belongs to the Bethel Assemblies of God Church and preaches at many of its cells. She is admired as a fluid, eloquent preacher, well-versed in the Bible, and able to relate scripture to people’s everyday lives and to exercise control and authority over her listeners. To exercise this power, she must create an effect and reaction in the audience: “those who exercise power depend on the actions of others who recognize that power . . . [and] a common form of recognition is subordination.” We observed subordination among María’s listeners as she preached the Scriptures. Cell members praised the importance of her work as a spiritual leader blessed with authority and charisma, even though she was a woman. According to Magdalena Villarreal, subordination “does not mean that those who give in become powerless, but that [power] is fluid and constantly negotiated” through the nature of relationships. María obeys the wishes of others (church authorities), but her actions show how church members can become empowered. Irma, another member of the Bethel church, from Guerrero, Mexico, is training to be a preacher. Her experience illustrates the interplay of power relationships in intermediate religious spaces: “I haven’t preached yet, but I want to. The Lord says we must prepare ourselves through books to learn to speak, because everything done for the Lord must be done well, not just any old thing. . . . I mean, you’re speaking the Word of a King, not idle chatter. To preach, you have to enter the church or cells and earn merit. . . . [T]hen they’ll make you a leader” (emphasis added). Irma is anxious to become a leader like María, a desire that has led her to extend her religious practice from temple to home. She founded a cell at her home, where María preaches, and this serves a dual purpose: allowing her to participate in God’s work and helping her prepare her knowledge of the scriptures “to do God’s will” and thank Him for all He has given her. “I feel good about what I’ve done and I thank God because I know everything comes from Him. People get ahead in life but don’t remember Him. He made things tough for me here but allowed me to stay, and I’ve been very happy since I reconciled with God, because I’ve received many good things” (emphasis added).

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Among these “good things” is economic progress. She and her husband came to the United States in , still young, and lived in Dallas for several years before moving to Florida. At first they worked in agriculture, but to increase their income Irma suggested they organize tandas: “In Orlando . . . I said we should organize tandas, but he said there’s no time, . . . no money. I started with my family, eleven people. We organized tandas for about three years. That’s how we started getting money, first to buy clothes for my kids. Through tandas we saved fifteen thousand dollars, and I told him I wanted to open a restaurant. He said, ‘You need lots of money for that business,’ so I said we had to do something because we weren’t going to work in the fields all our lives. ‘What about opening a paletería?’ ” (emphasis added). The shop they opened in Immokalee in  has been so successful that they earned enough money to obtain a home loan. Irma is key to their businesses: “Nobody can hold me back. . . . I manage everything, . . . permits, the house, loans, subcontracting.” This Pentecostal believer demonstrates not only exceptional personal agency, but a strong religious motivation that has helped her to develop and grow in both material and spiritual dimensions. Among Brazilians, Marilia’s life history echoes María’s and Irma’s, while offering an important counterpoint. Marilia comes from a poor family, although her studies to become a nun give her important symbolic capital. She worked as a nun for some years before leaving Brazil for the United States in the early s, where she cared for her ailing father. She met a Brazilian man, became pregnant, and decided to marry and stay in Florida, a decision that changed her life: from nun to wife and mother, confronted with the challenges and hardships of daily life in a new destination. “Back home, the rhythm of life was very different . . . intense pastoral work, academic studies and I felt really fulfilled. It was a radical change, because here you have to accept your situation as a migrant and work to survive” (emphasis added). Because religion was such a fundamental part of her life before migrating, she looked for a religious space after arriving in Florida but found no Brazilian Catholic churches. So, with her family she helped to organize the first meetings of Brazilian Catholics in the area: “Lay couples that had been in movements in Brazil took the initiative. Each week they’d go to one family’s home, pray, and socialize, until priests organized the community. Here the church is more conservative, the CEBs (Ecclesial Base Communities), evangelization groups that held Bible study and awareness sessions in homes, began in the ’s down there [in Brazil] but didn’t start here ’til the ’s.” Today, Marilia only occasionally attends meetings of the evangelization groups, as she and her husband joined the Encontro de Casais com Cristo movement, another Catholic organization from Brazil: “The idea is to do something more autonomous. There [in Brazil] it was an elite movement that later became popularized. Here it’s adapted to the context of migrants’ realities. The Church was the path that helped us adapt better to American society. With the groups we

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reflect on what living the faith [means] here. Why are you here? This is a question we ask ourselves through the eyes of faith. We believe there must be a greater “why,” beyond work and social and financial stability” (emphasis added). Given her academic training and experience as a nun, Marilia illustrates better than Angela the importance that women place on becoming carriers of a sacred mission that gives them a dimension of power and authority despite their marginal position. She constructs a theodicy that responds to her new material conditions. Like the other Brazilian immigrant women we interviewed, Marilia needed to transform her migrant condition into a kind of vocation or calling from God (something not characteristic of Mexicans). Here, the spiritual factor replaces economic and social motives in explaining migration. These examples also demonstrate that interaction with the sacred provides believers with desired benefits according to their socioeconomic circumstances. Though Marilia left the convent, her desire to continue her religious practice led her to form an evangelization group and become active in the Catholic Church. Through her membership in Encontro de Casais, she preserves her religiosity and finds guidance as she seeks answers to her dilemma of being an immigrant and a woman. Like Irma, she improved her well-being by cleaning houses before becoming a nurse’s assistant with better wages and working conditions. Now, she and her husband have their own house and a comfortable economic situation. In contrast to Marilia’s life history, Irma’s contains no evidence of an urgent search for self-fulfillment to legitimize migration. She accepts the hardships implicit in living in a foreign country as her fate and never pauses to ask why she left Mexico because in the United States her socioeconomic status has improved markedly. She sees positive changes between what she once was and what she has accomplished. Her relation to the sacred (including her interest in preaching) reflects different motives than Marilia has. Though she wants to increase her prestige/status in her religious community, the benefits of her greater knowledge of the Scriptures will not serve to legitimize her new social position in Florida since she did not experience downward social mobility as did Marilia. The devotion of these two women leaves no doubt that they consider themselves good believers; but here we wish to emphasize the reasons that they themselves give to explain their religious behavior in the migratory context. The intermediate spaces that churches offer these immigrant women constitute privileged sites of authority and power where women can achieve their personal goals. These spaces are at the same time institutionally accredited domains, yet distant from centers of religious power. In churches, the priest or minister has knowledge and authority over the congregation, but in Pentecostal cells or Catholic evangelization groups it is María, Irma, and Marilia who possess such knowledge and authority. Intermediate spaces function as excellent sites for distributing sacred power, as the distance from churches and the privacy of homes allow people to compete for institutional leadership in such groups.

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Moreover, because these women’s religious authority, charisma, and knowledge are legitimized by institutions, they can aspire to higher positions as believers.

Conclusions In migratory contexts, there are multiple ways of interacting with God and converting religion into a means of emancipation. Analyses of gender and religion have largely ignored rural Mexico’s traditional (popular) Catholicism, viewing it exclusively as a mechanism of oppression. However, the narratives presented here show that traditional Catholicism, the Charismatic Movement, and Pentecostalism (also considered conservative) can all serve as “liberating raw material” for immigrant women if social conditions allow it. The cases analyzed in this chapter demonstrate that immigrant believers can attain greater selfesteem and autonomy, while not necessarily eradicating the conditions of female subordination. In particular, we showed how what we call in-between religious spaces can help women link private and public spheres, offering the possibility for empowerment through their simultaneous association with institutional religious networks and their relative autonomy. Throughout this chapter we have highlighted the important socioeconomic differences between Brazilian and Mexican immigrants. Brazilians arrived in Florida with more human and social capital than Mexicans and were able to secure higher-paying jobs in the service sector, while the latter more often worked in agriculture. This is explained largely by the socioeconomic background of immigrant women, their migration trajectories, and the type of socialization they received before emigrating. The Brazilian immigrants we interviewed are from middle-class backgrounds. Most attended high school or university and enjoy social positions in Florida markedly higher than those of the Mexican women. Some Brazilian women are housewives, economically dependent on their husbands, with free time to study or participate in religious activities. Their discourse expresses a theodicy that legitimizes, explains, and justifies migration and their new social position in the receiving community, where they have lost social status due to the kinds of low-prestige jobs and lifestyles they were forced to accept as immigrants. For these women, “evil” materializes when they arrive in a foreign country that treats them as secondclass citizens; so to explain their new living conditions they turn to God’s goodness and their sacred mission to transform this evil from a form of punishment into a personal commitment with the sacred. Narratives of Mexican immigrant women, in contrast, contain no theodicy to legitimize migration, nor the social implications that accompany it. These women reconstruct theodicies—or forms of divine justification—to comprehend the hardships of daily life in a manner that is more extensive but less precise than that of Brazilian women. The Mexican women we interviewed were from

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rural, lower social classes. They do not see migration and its consequences as evil; to the contrary, they see their material conditions improving despite the double discrimination they suffer as women and as a national minority. Thus, they re-elaborate a theodicy that helps them overcome the vicissitudes of life in a foreign country where they are seen as second- or even third-class citizens. This comparison between Brazilian and Mexican immigrant women shows the fruitfulness of taking the variable of religion seriously in the study of gender and migration, while not ignoring the economic factors which condition the available religious options and call for different forms of religious legitimation. Religion, however, does not simply reflect the dynamics of labor markets and class differences. Its relations with the economics of migration are often unpredictable. Moreover, in contributing to the re-articulation of gender roles and family relations during the process of migration, religion also plays active roles that must be researched further. NOTES

. See Lois Lorentzen, “El milagro está en casa: Gender and Private/Public Empowerment in a Migrant Pentecostal Church,” Latin American Perspectives , no.  (): –; Marie Marquardt Friedmann, “From Shame to Confidence: Gender, Religious Conversion, and Civic Engagement of Mexicans in the U.S. South,” Latin American Perspectives , no.  (): –; and Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola, “Religión y figura femenina: Entre la norma y la práctica,” La Ventana  (): –. . Dalia Bassols and Cristina Oehmichen, eds., Migración y relaciones de género en México (Mexico: GIMTRAP-UNAM/IIA, ); Patricia Pessar and Sarah Mahler, “Gender and Transnational Migration,” paper presented at the conference Transnational Migration: Comparative Perspectives, Princeton University, June – July , ; Patricia R. Pessar, “Engendering Migration Studies: The Case of New Immigrants in the United States,” in Gender and U.S. Immigration: Contemporary Trends, ed. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, – (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); Ofelia Woo, “Las mujeres mexicanas indocumentadas en la migración internacional y la movilidad transfronteriza,” in Mujeres, migración y maquila en la frontera norte, ed. Soledad González et al., – (Mexico: COLEF-COLMEX, ). The religious dimension is ignored even in recent publications on gender issues from varying perspectives, such as in Hondagneu-Sotelo’s edited volume, Gender and U.S. Immigration.

. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila, “I’m Here, but I’m There,” in Gender and U.S. Immigration, ed. Hondagneu-Sotelo, . . Pessar and Mahler, “Gender and Transnational Migration,” . . Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in Lived Religion in America, ed. David Hall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), . . Orsi, “Everyday Miracles,” . . Pessar, “Engendering Migration Studies”; Víctor Espinosa, El dilema del retorno: Migración, género y pertenencia en un contexto transnacional (Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán/El Colegio de Jalisco, ); Woo, “Las mujeres mexicanas indocumentadas”; María Eugenia D’aubeterre, El pago de la novia (Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán/Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, ).

. Pessar, “Engendering Migration Studies,” .

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. Ibid., . . Of this . percent, . percent are people who declared “no religion” in the census. . This includes evangelicals and “non-biblical” evangelicals. According to the  National Census, the former includes members of historical Protestant and Pentecostal churches; the latter, Seventh-Day Adventists, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

. The Cristero rebellion took place in the Bajío region of Mexico (–), when broad sectors of the Catholic population confronted an anti-clerical, post-revolutionary Mexican state.

. Elizabeth Juárez Cerdi, Modelando a las Evas: Mujeres de virtud y rebeldía (Zamora, Michoacán: El Colegio de Michoacán, ). . The term pintero indicates people who pick “colored” tomatoes, those that have begun to turn red and that buyers do not purchase. Once Florencia learned this work, she began to operate as an independent pintera, which allowed her to accumulate some capital that she later multiplied through new businesses.

. Antonio Flavio Pierucci, “Bye, bye, Brazil—O declínio das religiões tradicionais no Censo ,” Revista Estudos Avançados  (September/December ): –; César Romero Jacobi et al., Atlas da filiação religiosa e indicadoes sociais no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro/S. Paulo: PUC Rio/Loyola/CNBB, ). . Comparisons of these data are risky: the Brazilian census reflects peoples’ selfclassification of religion, while in Florida we ascertained the number of churches and estimated the number of immigrants that frequent them.

. “Evangelicals” include historical Protestants, Pentecostals, and neo-Pentecostals. . Paul Freston, “Becoming Brazuca: Brazilian Immigration to the US,” unpublished paper, Harvard University, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, . . Otto Maduro explains that when Latino migrants join churches (especially evangelical ones), they cease to be “undocumented,” “suspicious” or “without rights” and become people chosen and protected by God to fulfill a “sacred mission.” We use the notion of a sacred mission in a broader sense that includes transforming oneself. Otto Maduro, “Notas sobre pentecostalismo y poder entre inmigrantes latinoamericanos en la ciudad de Newark,” paper presented at the thirteenth Congress on Religious Alternatives in Latin America, Porto Alegre, Brazil, September –, , . . The anthropological study of religion speaks of systems of religious meanings but also links those meanings to social processes. See Clifford Geertz, La interpretación de las culturas (Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa, ).

. . . .

Freston, “Becoming Brazuca.” Pessar, “Engendering Migration Studies,” . See chapter  in this volume. Cecília Menjívar, “Latino Immigrants and Their Perceptions of Religious Institutions: Cubans,

Salvadorans,

and

Guatemalans

in

Phoenix,

Arizona,”

Migraciones

Internacionales  (July/December ): .

. Marquardt Friedmann, “From Shame to Confidence,” . . Anna Peterson, “The Only Way I Can Walk: Women, Christianity, and Everyday Life in El Salvador,” in Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas, ed. Anna L. Peterson, Manuel A. Vásquez, and Philip J. Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), . . A phrase from existentialism and the source of the neologism “lived religion.” Orsi, “Everyday Miracles,” . . The symbol of the Virgin of Guadalupe is highly polysemic and can be associated with religious, nationalist, gendered, and/or secular meanings.

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. Robert Orsi, The Madonna of th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, –, nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), xxi. . See additional references to Tránsito in chapter . . This is the subtitle of Grace Davie’s book on religion in Britain during the postwar period. Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since : Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, ). . See Faustino Teixeira and Renata Menezes, “Introdução,” in As religiões no Brasil: Continuidades e rupturas, ed. Faustino Teixeira and Renata Menezes, – (Brazil: Ed. Vozes, Petrópolis, ); Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola, ed., Creyentes y creencias en Guadalajara (Mexico: CIESAS/INAH/El Colegio de Jalisco, ); Rafael Díaz Salazar, “La religión vacía: Un análisis de la transición religiosa en Occidente,” in Formas modernas de religión, ed. Rafael Díaz Salazar, Salvador Giner, and Fernando Velasco, – (Madrid: Alianza Universidad, ); Roland Campiche, “De la pertenencia a la identificación religiosa: El paradigma de la individualización de la religión hoy en día,” Religiones Latinoamericanas  (January–June ): –; Danièle Hervieu-Lèger, “Religion and Modernity in the French Context: For a New Approach to Secularization,” Sociological Analysis  (): –; José María Mardones, Postmodernidad y neoconservadurismo (Estella, Navarra: Editorial Verbo Divino, ).

. Regina Novaes, “Pentecostalismo, política, mídia e favela,” in Religião e cultura popular, ed. Victor Valla, – (Rio de Janeiro: DP&A, ). . An old Portuguese proverb: “Deus ajuda a quem cedo madruga.” . The Baiano Catholics from Bahía, Brazil, are known for their broad syncretism. . Rituals linked to Afro-Brazilian religions. . “Cells” are weekly gatherings of sympathizers and potential members to propagate the faith, formed outside the church and led by families.

. In her study of Mexican immigrants in metro Atlanta, Marquardt found that “religious conversion encouraged women in particular to become ‘popular subjects’: confident, articulate and capable persons with the habits and dispositions necessary for leadership in their religious organization.” Marquardt Friedmann, “From Shame to Confidence,” . . Magdalena Villarreal, “La reinvención de las mujeres y el poder en los procesos de desarrollo rural planeado,” La Ventana  (Universidad de Guadalajara, ): . . Ibid., . . In Mexico, tandas (mutualistas) are a form of popular rotating savings: people give a monthly payment for a certain time and each month one participant receives the entire amount, allowing people who do not qualify for bank loans to accumulate an incipient capital.

. A paletería is a shop that sells popsicles and ice cream. . Today, the shop is a restaurant that serves Mexican food. Open every day, it has become very popular. Irma’s husband manages the restaurant, and she takes care of related businesses.

. Robert Smith, in his study of Mexican immigrants in New York, found that a women’s prayer group created “a space for female authority and power” and gave its members public roles in a male-dominated immigrant organization. Robert Smith, Mexican New York (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), .

. Working with neo-Pentecostal women in Brazil, Machado discovered that their social place has changed and that some topics from the feminist agenda are being incorporated, though recognizing that male-female relations are still asymmetrical. Maria das Dores C. Machado, “Neopentecostalismo: Relações de poder entre os gêneros,” Caminhos  (July-December ): –.

10 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A Place to Be New and Old Geographies of Latin American Migration in Florida and Beyond TIMOTHY J. STEIGENGA, MANUEL A. VÁSQUEZ, AND PHILIP J. WILLIAMS

The key concepts that frame the chapters in this volume, transnationalism, collective mobilization, and lived religion, represent both empirical subjects of investigation and critical analytical tools for understanding and interpreting the dynamics of immigrant life in new destinations. The preceding chapters provide ample empirical evidence and measures of transnationalism, mobilization, and lived religion in each of the cases we have studied. While the experience of Brazilians, Guatemalans, and Mexicans in South Florida cannot be generalized to all Latin American immigrants, it does highlight some of the central processes and trends that characterize Latino immigration to new destinations in the United States.

Transnationalism in New Destinations The case studies presented in this volume suggest that transnationalism plays an influential role in new destinations of Latino immigration. The preceding chapters demonstrate that transnational practices and forms of organization can assist immigrants in the construction of individual and collective identities as they negotiate the process of settlement—as they find a place to be. As Manuel Vásquez argues in chapter , the concept of community, as it has been traditionally utilized, may be ill-suited for understanding the complex web of border-spanning connections that characterize such immigrant lives. At first glance, there is very little to suggest the existence of a Brazilian “community” in the areas we studied. But beneath the surface and “ideology of disunity” among Brazilian immigrants, we uncovered a rich tapestry of interpersonal networks that connect individuals, families, and worshippers across and within borders. In the face of structural constraints (economic, spatial, legal, and otherwise) Brazilians form such networks as part of their “ways of being” even if the networks 209

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do not yet add up to a visible Brazilian “community” which could propagate more institutionalized “ways of belonging.” The case of Brazilians in Broward County shows that in new destinations where immigrants have to reconstitute the fabric of sociability almost from scratch in the face of an increasingly inhospitable environment, it may be more fruitful for scholars to focus on the myriad of emerging and shifting personal networks than on a reified concept of community. This focus can give us a more nuanced understanding of the gradual and precarious formation of collective identity and mobilization. Our survey results document the “multiple embeddedness” of Brazilian immigrants, at least at the level of information, finances, and personal relations. Thus, the Brazilian case demonstrates the centrality of “core transnationalism”—transnational “activities that form an integral part of an individual’s habitual life [and] are undertaken on a regular basis,” even when an institutionalized “transnational community” does not formally exist. Put in another way, many Brazilians in Broward County live transnational lives, making cultural bifocality an essential ingredient in their day-to-day interactions. Nevertheless, they have not become “transnational villagers,” with visible, full-fledged organizations, such as hometown associations, linking particular locations across national borders. As in the Brazilian case, the Guatemalan Mayan immigrants of Jupiter have constructed an intricate web of transnational family and personal networks. But unlike the Brazilians, the levels and forms of transnationalism we found among the Jupiter Maya were significantly expanded. A fully developed transnational social field with networks that carry material as well as symbolic and moral goods has developed and become institutionalized between Jacaltenango and Jupiter. While the Brazilians in Deerfield Beach and Pompano Beach come from various locations throughout Brazil, many of the Guatemalans in Jupiter are bound by ethnic, geographic, language, and religious ties that facilitate the building of a more visible transnational community. Comparison of these two cases, thus, shows us that the intensity and extensity of transnationalism in new destinations is affected by the cultural and social capitals that immigrants bring to the process of settlement. In the absence of networks established by previous immigrants that can be redeployed transnationally, new arrivals have to rely more heavily on the sense of belonging and the multiple identities they had in the country of origin. In the face of a foreign and frequently hostile environment, Mayan immigrants in Jupiter turn to their primary sources of physical and emotional support: family, community, and church. In the process, they consciously and unconsciously adopt a survival strategy that entails the construction of deep and increasingly institutionalized transnational linkages at all of the levels outlined in chapter . The most striking finding from the Jupiter case is the profound ambiguity and elusiveness that characterizes the construction and maintenance of this transnational social field.

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As outlined in chapters  and , the transnational lives of Jupiter’s most recent Mayan immigrants combine re-created images of their homes in the past, the struggle to survive in the difficult conditions of the present, and an effort to imagine a future that entails a return to home, filled with hope and aspirations but simultaneously conditioned by uncertainty and fear. The psychological stress associated with this form of multiple embeddedness has thus far received scant attention in the literature on transnationalism. Two factors outlined in chapter  merit significantly more attention in work on transnational migration. First, the meaning and implications of transnational fields are mediated by gender, stage of life, and location within the immigration process. For example, Jacaltec women in Jupiter are faced with pressures to reproduce gender roles from the home village while simultaneously adapting to the difficulties of living in a society with different expectations. Since there are relatively few women (females represent less than one-third of Jupiter’s total immigrant population) and they have little access to transportation, women frequently face these challenges in relative social isolation. In terms of life cycle and immigration wave, we found key differences between previous waves of immigrants (refugees and asylum seekers) and more recent economic refugees, whose economic and social remittances help them to maintain a material and symbolic presence with their families in their communities of origin. Because the more recent immigrants are more likely to be undocumented, they face significant obstacles to both their integration into existing institutions in the receiving community (bridging social capital through participation in religious, work-related, or civic institutions) and their ability to deepen transnational ties (as physical, legal, and financial impediments limit their mobility). Second, the distance and separation generated by migration inflicts a heavy burden on family relations for transmigrants. Moving to the United States removes individuals from social enforcement of norms through communal and family authorities, a void that is filled, at least for some, by churches and other civic organizations. Furthermore, transnational gossip, primarily in the form of frequent phone conversations (but also through videos and e-mail) puts constant pressure on transmigrants and their family members at home. As one young man recently explained, “My wife already knows what happens here before I even talk to her. I called her yesterday and she already knew that Francisco was leaving tomorrow. It is supposed to be a secret but it looks like everybody already knows. Honestly, the same thing happens in the other direction. My wife calls me and tells me about events in Jacal that are already old news here—but I pretend not to know about them.” Transnational gossip serves as a form of social control that has a direct impact on all members of the transnational community. The lives of women who remain in Jacaltenango are circumscribed by fears of reports of bad behavior that might reach their husbands in Jupiter. Meanwhile, in

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Jupiter, the slightest rumor of impropriety by a family member or acquaintance back in Guatemala can pass like wildfire throughout the community. As is often the case with gossip, events are quickly distorted in the retelling. From the Jupiter case, we learn to treat the multiple levels and forms of transnationalism as a double-edged sword. While the transnational Fiesta Maya allows Mayan immigrants to celebrate their culture and reaffirm their identity in a new an alien context, the aforementioned elements of transnational gossip and expectations add immense pressures to their daily lives. The ambiguities, nostalgia, and contradictions of maintaining lives in multiple locations are palpable. Furthermore, the immigrants themselves are painfully aware of the ways in which their physical presence in one location fundamentally alters the other through the changes wrought by ever-growing economic and social remittances. Forced to operate within the “coordinates of the possible,” Jupiter’s Mayan immigrants, like other waves of immigrants before them, establish and maintain their transnational families because that is the option that is available to them. The case of Mexicans in Immokalee also adds key insights to our understanding of transnationalism in new and old destinations. In contrast with Jupiter, low levels of social capital, significant cultural/ethnic heterogeneity, and extreme economic deprivation present significant obstacles to constituting and reproducing transnational ties. Although our survey research and qualitative interviews provide plenty of evidence of “migrant-led transnationalism”— such as sending remittances, videos, and letters and maintaining kinship networks across borders—more institutionalized forms of transnationalism (hometown associations and collective community projects) are largely absent in the Immokalee case. In that sense, the Mexican case has striking parallels with that of Brazilians in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach. This is despite the fact that Brazilians are located in an urban and exurban space, while Immokalee is a rural setting, and that Brazilians have on the average a higher socioeconomic status and higher levels of formal education than Mexican immigrants. Nevertheless, both groups face spatiotemporal constraints that limit their capacity to engage in transnational practices. In spite of the fact that there is a long history of Mexican immigration to Immokalee, the harsh labor and housing conditions and the constant internal movement following the harvest seasons have made it very difficult for Mexicans to build institutionalized forms of transnationalism, in effect, putting them in the same situation as newer arrivals like Brazilians, who have not had the time to establish formalized links. What these two cases suggest is that there is a need to study systematically more than just the various types of transnationalism, or how widespread or durable this phenomenon is across different immigrant generations, as Peggy Levitt, Alejandro Portes, and associates have done. We also need to study the economic, spatial, physical, temporal, social, and

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other factors that constrain the practice of transnationalism, particularly in new destinations where immigrant networks are incipient. An exception in the Mexican case is an ethnically cohesive group of indigenous Otomí immigrants who have constructed a “transnational moral community” with institutionalized positions of responsibility, networks of mutual aid in employment, a common language, and the frequent celebration of rituals and fiestas. Despite their relatively recent arrival, the Otomíes have parlayed this transnational social capital into economic resources, allowing them to escape the bottom-rung jobs of the agricultural industry in Immokalee. For the more established immigrants, such as the Chamacuarenses from Guanajuato, the form and level of transnationalism follows a more well-worn path. The Chamacuarenses primarily express their transnational ties through participation in and support of their fiesta patronal. Their connections are institutionalized primarily through their relationship with the Catholic Church; however, the unstructured nature of immigrant participation and organization of the fiesta resembles the kind of decentralized, flexible transnational religious ties that Levitt refers to as “negotiated transnational religious organization.” With more than thirty years of immigration between Chamácuaro and Immokalee, these immigrants have gained greater social status and diversified their social networks over time. They have adapted to (rather than assimilated into) the environment of Immokalee. Finally, it appears that the absence of established immigrant pathways that facilitate settlement and integration encourages Otomíes in Immokalee and Jacaltecos in Jupiter to develop transnational networks that link them with their communities of origin. In other words, cultivating transnational relations can be part of a survival strategy for immigrants in new destinations. In contrast, for more established immigrants like Chamacuarenses, participation in transnational fiestas is largely unrelated to questions of survival in the community of settlement. These findings suggest that the emergence of transnational communities has less to do with the time of arrival of immigrants than with the context of reception and the group’s level of social and cultural capital as manifested in ethnic solidarity.

Transnationalism and Collective Mobilization The different forms of transnationalism and solidarity among the Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants provide an excellent transition to our next set of questions about collective mobilization. What are the implications of the various models of transnationalism we uncovered for collective action among immigrant groups, and how do they interact with the contexts of new destinations in South Florida? The cases of Immokalee and Jupiter present us with clear contrasts in terms of social capital, reactive ethnicity, and transnationalism. As we demonstrated

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in chapter , Jupiter’s immigrants experience the social and economic conditions necessary to produce reactive ethnicity at significantly higher rates than immigrants in Immokalee. They also have more institutionalized networks, greater economic stability, and more established transnational ties. Over time, this bonding social capital was transformed into bridging social capital, bringing multiple groups together to focus on the creation of an immigrant resource center for the town. Thus, defensive identities were translated into project identities with the help of local churches and the university. These institutions provided the networks, skills, spaces, leadership, and resources to translate the existing social capital into political capital at the local level. With the exception of the small group of Otomíes, levels of social capital and institutionalized transnationalism in Immokalee were significantly lower than in Jupiter. With a majority Latino population, Immokalee is a less fertile ground for the growth of defensive identities or reactive ethnicity. Interestingly, class-based rather than identity-based organizing has been more effective in the context of Immokalee. Even so, the mobile livelihoods of migrant farmworkers present serious obstacles to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ organizing efforts. Consequently, the Coalition has attempted to amplify and extend its struggle to new constituencies beyond Immokalee. What began as a farmworker organization focused on local issues has evolved into a broader national movement. Although the Coalition has developed transnational linkages with social movements in Latin America and elsewhere, unlike the case of Jacaltecos in Jupiter, transnationalism has not been a key element in its mobilization efforts. Early on, support from the Catholic Church was critical in providing organizational resources and networks for the Coalition. As in the case of Jupiter, the Coalition has relied on the support of external actors, including churches, students, and labor organizations, to transform its struggle from localized actions into a nationwide boycott of the fast-food giants Taco Bell and McDonald’s. In each context, there are potential dangers, pitfalls, and drawbacks to the form of mobilization initiated. In Jupiter, ethnic cleavages, counter mobilizations, and some degree of downward assimilation represent serious risks for incipient immigrant social movements. In Immokalee, the Coalition’s success in projecting its struggle on the national stage is conditioned by a growing sense that the organization is out of touch with local issues. Such concerns may have been behind the Coalition’s recent decision to play a highly visible role in organizing the march in Fort Meyers, Florida, as part of the massive immigrant rights mobilizations of April and May . The case of Brazilians in Broward County highlights some of the formidable structural obstacles facing immigrants in building on interpersonal networks to create their own organizations. In chapter  we saw how under an “immigrant regime of production” Brazilians come to populate the “secondary sector proletariat and the reserve army” of the U.S. economy. Given their undocumented

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status, precarious work conditions, and lack of access to public spaces, many immigrants seek protection and invisibility in religious and business networks. Religious networks provide an important source of information, job referrals, as well as spiritual and emotional support for immigrants. As in the case of Jupiter, the creation and evolution of these networks has relied on transnational linkages with religious organizations in Brazil and the United States. In the absence of other Brazilian community organizations, some leaders in the Catholic and Baptist churches have assumed more visible roles in advocating on behalf of immigrants both in the United States and in Brazil. Whether these networks remain latent and submerged or become activated for future mobilization is an open question. In contrast to Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants in Jupiter and Immokalee, it appears that most Brazilians have opted for a strategy of “hunkering down,” as evidenced in their general distrust of neighbors and withdrawal from collective life. However, the organizational success of Brazilian immigrants in traditional gateway cities such as Boston and New York points to the possibilities for future mobilization. As discussed in chapter , the gap between empowerment and power can be a long-term process, often necessitating the establishment of bonds of solidarity and trust before achieving more community-oriented activism. It may be that after an initial period of hunkering down in a new destination, the bonding social capital generated within religious and labor networks will evolve into bridging social capital that enables Brazilians to build the connective structures necessary for collective organization. What role does religion play in immigrant collective action and mobilization? Both in the United States and in Latin America, much has been written about the role of religion in “framing” ideological or motivational resources to social movements. Our research suggests that immigrant activists frequently frame their identity through certain religious resources, beliefs, practices, rituals, and cultures that make them more prone to be engaged and mobilized for collective action. Beyond framing, the common factors we found that link religion and immigrant mobilization are community building, resource mobilization, and a role for religious institutions and leaders as interlocutors. These are familiar themes for social movement theory that echo earlier findings from studies of the role of religion in the civil rights movement in the United States. In numerous social movement studies, religious organizations have been found to provide the networks, skills, discretionary resources (time and effort of members), free spaces (from the physical or ideological control of other powerful actors), and collective identity (shared sense of community) necessary to begin and maintain social movements. As discussed in chapter , in Jupiter, an interfaith alliance of religious congregations generated an expansive discourse of tolerance and social justice that paved the way for the approval of a new employment and resource center. In Immokalee, the Coalition of Immokalee

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Workers drew from religious traditions of social activism in framing its successful boycott against the corporate giants Taco Bell and McDonald’s. Moreover, the Coalition forged a network of support groups including many religious organizations and people of faith across the country. In Deerfield Beach and Pompano Beach, local church leaders have been the most visible voices in advocating on behalf of Brazilian immigrants. Still, in many cases, this advocacy is not framed in overtly “political” terms, emphasizing social justice and the need to transform the structures that exclude immigrants. Particularly, Brazilian evangelical Protestant churches in Broward County are wary of openly challenging the current Republican administration, with which they share a conservative social agenda. Their advocacy, then, is often couched as a plea not to punish the like-minded Christians that make up their congregations. For many of these Protestant congregations, religious identity trumps immigrant identity, although sometimes the argument is made in evangelical circles that immigrants are bringing a type of Christianity that can morally regenerate this country. Thus, to provide amnesty to immigrants is to advance the conservative Christian agenda in America. Whether this kind of advocacy will translate into political influence and power is an open question.

Lived Religion, Identity, and Gender The authors in this volume adopted the lived-religion approach to be able to explore religious narratives and practices that were not directly connected with visible congregations, since one of the likely characteristics of new destinations is the relative absence of institutionalized religion. However, our study did not simply substitute “religious practices in the streets and workplaces for what goes on in churches” in new destinations. We paid attention to the connections between congregations and lived religion as well as the in-between or intermediate spaces. Particularly in the early stages of community formation, when there are few support networks available, we found that congregations often serve as quasi social service agencies, providing diverse forms of material and moral support, ranging from English classes to legal assistance with immigration matters to meeting space for labor unions and other civic organizations working on behalf of immigrants. By sponsoring activities like festivals, soccer leagues, and family picnics, they also offer entertainment and catharsis in the face of heavy work schedules and a hostile environment. Finally, by using the native language—be it Spanish or Portuguese—and by preserving and re-enacting the cultural and religious traditions of the societies of origin, congregations can help immigrants carve out new spaces of livelihood, often transposing the landscapes of the homeland onto the new places of settlement. Congregations can also provide “spaces of sociability” where church members can develop important civic skills and competences that can potentially be

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translated into more community-oriented initiatives. Our case studies found that congregations are especially important locations for immigrant women to gain human and social capital. For example, in chapter  we saw how Brazilian and Mexican immigrant women found opportunities to develop leadership skills through evangelical prayer groups and the Catholic marriage encounter movement. Nevertheless, our study also reveals that while some churches in new destinations have fulfilled a civic role, generally it has been somewhat limited. For example, in the Brazilian case, while some local church leaders have become more vocal in advocating on behalf of Brazilian immigrants, the civic skills developed in congregations have yet to generate the kind of leadership and organizations that have emerged in more traditional gateway cities. And in Jupiter and Immokalee it tends to be more established immigrants that have benefited most from their participation in churches and emerged as leaders in the community. Whether churches will come to play a more civic-minded role depends to a large extent on the theologies and pastoral approaches they develop. In all three cases, we found that the religious field in new immigrant destinations is a highly contested terrain populated by a range of theological and pastoral currents. For example, in Catholic churches we found a growing Charismatic Renewal Movement operating alongside traditional popular Catholicism and liberationist approaches. Moreover, the Catholic Church shares the stage with evangelical churches espousing a gospel of health and wealth, Spiritist centers focusing on individual intellectual and moral development, and Afro-Brazilian religions that emphasize spiritual purification and growth. While the growth of more emotive, personalistic pastoral and theological currents may seem to undermine the civic and community-oriented potential of religious organizations, this is not necessarily the case. As we saw in chapter , traditional Catholicism, the Charismatic Renewal Movement, and Pentecostalism can all serve as “liberating raw material” for immigrant women, while not necessarily eradicating the conditions of female subordination. We found that immigrant women in these faith traditions were able to attain greater personal autonomy and independence. Despite the importance of congregational life, our case studies in new destinations confirmed that congregations reach only a small minority of Latin American immigrants. Compared to more established immigrants, we found that recent immigrants are less likely to be members or frequent participants in congregational life. In part this is because the most recent immigrants lack the financial capital to pay for or participate in fiestas, the social capital to be invited, and the leisure time to spend in the first place. Many simply choose to practice their lived religion in the spaces between religious organizations, rather than through them—or to worship in intermediate spaces of prayer groups, where women, in particular, have access to equal treatment and can exercise their own religious authority and power, self esteem, and autonomy.

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The importance of these intermediate spaces in dealing with the dislocations produced by migration and settlement in new destinations is evident in all three of our cases. Our survey data clearly shows that the overwhelming majority of immigrants feel most comfortable at home—even when sharing a trailer with eight to ten strangers. So, it should not be surprising that these spaces are the preferred locations for prayer groups and communal celebrations of popular devotions. While some of these intermediate spaces are “authorized” and supported by religious officials, sometimes they emerge at the margins of churches and can often be overlooked by congregational studies. We found numerous examples of “believing without belonging,” where immigrants “mix and match elements from different faiths rather than observe strict boundaries between traditions.” In the most extreme case, the great majority of Mexican and Guatemalan farmworkers in Immokalee find it nearly impossible to be involved in local congregational life due to the extremely heavy work schedules, their precarious legal status, and the need to move across the country following the various growing seasons. To the extent that migrant farmworkers in Immokalee practice their religion, they do so extra-institutionally, drawing from the rituals, narratives, and symbols of traditional popular Catholicism in an attempt to deal creatively with concrete existential predicaments. To capture these grassroots, embodied, everyday, and pragmatic dimensions of immigrant religion, we found the concept of lived religion particularly helpful. The lived-religion approach proved especially fruitful in exploring how Mayan immigrants in Jupiter re-created images of home, drawing from religious resources ranging from embodied memories to material culture like marimbas, costumes, masks, and the icons of patron saints and of the Virgin Mary. The construction of home among Jacaltecos certainly passes through institutional Catholicism, as demonstrated by the fact that the fiesta begins with a solemn Mass. Nevertheless, home is religiously performed in the “secular” urban spaces of Jupiter, where Mayas literally transpose Jacaltenango through their procession and ritual dances. For a day, they sacralize streets to which, in everyday life, they only have access through their labor in construction or landscaping. These practices of carving extra-congregational religious and cultural spaces of being are precisely what we wanted to capture with the lived-religion approach. We believe that these practices gain great importance in new destinations, where immigrants are more likely to face isolation and outright hostility. The Fiesta Maya in Jupiter can be understood as “the sacred theater of a community,” through which different Maya groups in the town come together to enact and celebrate their collective identity. Robert Orsi uses this metaphor of sacred theater to characterize the feast of the Virgin of Mount Carmel among Italian immigrants in Harlem at the turn of the twentieth century. In this feast, “the streets became a stage and the people revealed themselves to themselves.

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The immigrants’ deepest values, their understandings of the truly human, their perceptions of the nature of reality were acted out; the hidden structures of power and authority were revealed.” In the case of the Maya in Jupiter, the fiesta tells us about their deep yearning and struggles to create a place to be, a place to be recognized as a community of human beings not just a faceless mass of “illegals.” Indeed, the process of constructing images of home through the fiesta, music, soccer leagues, procession, and religious images and practices has helped the Jacaltecos to maintain a sense of identity and solidarity that translated over time into collective action. The process of organizing, mobilizing, and carrying out the fiesta sparked the formation of institutional linkages with the university, local churches, and nonprofits. Thus, the momentum generated through a public manifestation of lived religion (the fiesta) provided both the sense of efficacy and the set of networks and institutional linkages necessary for the Mayan community to launch what would ultimately become a successful campaign to create the El Sol Community Resource Center in Jupiter. At the same time, by taking seriously the lived-religion school’s emphasis on the lived reality of in-between spaces (between institutional religion, ritual, and everyday life), we were struck by the underlying ambiguities and tensions that characterize the lives of Jupiter’s transnational migrants. Once again the fiesta provides an instructive example. The very sense of community and home that Jacaltecos savor in the fiesta cut precisely the other direction for the group of migrants from Totonicapán who were ultimately excluded from formal participation on stage. Despite attempts to imbue the fiesta with an ecumenical ethic, obvious tensions between religious groups also came to the fore. Thus, the very public nature of the fiesta exposed religious, ethnic, and cultural dividing lines that otherwise may remain hidden from view. The very ties that promote social capital and bond one group of migrants in solidarity may serve as a barrier to collaboration with the larger Mayan or immigrant community in general. While we welcome the renewed interest in religion among immigration scholars, our case studies point to the clear structural and spatial obstacles to practicing religion or participating in congregational life and also raise important questions about the portability of religion. Our survey evidence from Immokalee and Jupiter demonstrates that popular religious practices, especially traditional Catholic devotions, are practiced with less frequency in the United States as compared to immigrants’ communities of origin. In the case of Immokalee, many immigrants do not have their own personal spaces to construct home altars, hang religious images, or light candles to their preferred saints. Similarly, we found that the lack of access to public spaces inhibited immigrants from organizing fiestas patronales that are so important to building a sense of place. Even in Jupiter, where Guatemalan immigrants have succeeded in organizing the Fiesta Maya on an annual basis, their temporary appropriation of the streets to honor the Virgin of Candelaria is fleeting at best.

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The focus on new destinations, thus, not only demonstrates the creativity of immigrants in sustaining religious lives linked to but extending beyond congregations, but also shows the fragility of religious experiences and practices in precarious existential contexts. Here the experience of Mexicans and Guatemalans parallels those of older immigrant waves, such as Irish Catholics, who, particularly following the potato famine in the late s, came to American cities with meager resources to reconstitute their religious life. For them, as for Guatemalans and Mexicans, a combination of religious institutions, such as schools and fraternities, and popular devotions proved crucial in forging a viable defensive identity. However, the Irish could rely on the centralizing structure of the parish, which in the mid-s was undergoing transcontinental renewal as part of a process of Romanization. In contrast, as the New Paradigm in the sociology of religion rightly posits (see chapter ), Mexicans and Guatemalans today face highly pluralistic religious markets with no hegemonic institutional morphology. Rather, this market is populated by shifting symbols, practices, and forms of organization that circulate and cross-fertilize often instantaneously through global, transnational, and diasporic networks. In contrast to Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants, Brazilian immigrants, though they arrived in South Florida later, enjoy certain social advantages— higher educational and social status—that tend to favor increased religious participation in the receiving community. Although we cannot draw comparative findings from the Brazilian survey data, our qualitative interviews revealed that many Brazilian immigrants, especially women, intensify their religious activities in the United States. Religious participation provides them an important source of support, solidarity, and self-improvement in the face of a hostile world. Nevertheless, as Vásquez’s chapter shows, even Brazilians struggle to extend their religious practices beyond the safe and intimate spaces of home. Robert Orsi has documented the centrality of home in religious life for earlier immigrant groups. Facing “a poor, densely populated, and physically deteriorating place, troubled by crime and juvenile delinquency,” Italian immigrants in East Harlem carved “a place that people came to love, a place where . . . [they] created a community life.” They did so by relying on the “domus,” a complex world of reciprocal duties and exchanges anchored on the family and home. Brazilians, too, transpose memories, desires, moral maps, and emotional attachments associated with home into the decentered spaces of Broward County, building and extending personal networks that often operate transnationally. However, in contrast to Italians in East Harlem in the late s, Brazilians today cannot as readily tap into the extended family ties that were at the heart of the domus in southern Italy at the turn of the twentieth century. Rapid urbanization and globalization have drastically transformed traditional notions of family and home in Brazil. And when Brazilians come to Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach, they face geographical dispersion, not the heavily populated tenements

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that Italian immigrants in New York encountered. In the absence of a physically circumscribed neighborhood, of public spaces not subject to the logic of the automobile, the building of sociability is a more daunting task. By comparing Mexicans in Immokalee, Guatemalans in Jupiter, and Brazilians in Broward County with Irish and Italian Catholics in New York, we want to underline the fact that in order to understand the specificities of new destinations we need to compare them with “old” migrations. The “newness” of nontraditional destinations can only be assessed through an analysis of historical continuities and ruptures. Such a comparative analysis suggests that, in exploring new destinations, we must not assume that religion will always play a prominent role in the lives of immigrants. While we need to look beyond visible congregational expressions in order to capture the creative ways in which religion is lived existentially amid strange and hostile territories, we also must avoid focusing exclusively on the positive contributions religion can make to the migration process. In taking seriously the complexity and ambiguity of religion, we can see that it can sometimes empower immigrants, but not always. As José Claúdio Souza Alves discusses in chapter , religious networks can facilitate the formation of collective identity and solidarity among Brazilian immigrants, but these networks often serve as the moral and spiritual infrastructure for an immigrant mode of production that extracts surplus from undocumented immigrants. Souza Alves’s claim resonates with the experiences of other recent immigrants groups. For instance, Kenneth Guest has observed a similar ambivalent role for religious organizations among Chinese immigrants from Fujian Province (Fuzhounese) in New York City. “Fuzhounese religious communities are central sites for constructing and reconstructing networks of ethnic solidarity and accessing financial and social capital as immigrants make their way along an often precarious journey. At the same time, this isolated ethnic enclave [the Chinatown in which immigrants settle with the help of religious communities] is a trap for many Fuzhounese who, marginalized by language, culture, and class from both the mainstream U.S. economy and the Chinatown elites, have no way to escape.” The practice of exploiting the newly arrived using immigrant networks built on trust (such as kinship-based and religious organizations) is, of course, not new. Chinese immigrants after the California gold rush of  relied heavily on familial networks to borrow the money necessary to travel to the United States, often having to pay it back at a very high interest rate. Similar dynamics of inter-ethnic exploitation and competition have been documented by Sarah Mahler and Cecilia Menjívar among Salvadoran immigrants. What is different for new destinations today is the heightened vulnerability of immigrants, particularly those who are undocumented, due to the new capitalist regime of production. More specifically, the transportation and communication technologies associated with this regime have allowed the formation of a vast and lucrative

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transnational economy of smuggling that is light years beyond the activities of your average local coyote. In fact, localized smuggling activities that operate through networks of relatives, friends, and members of the same religious or ethnic group are increasingly colonized by sophisticated and impersonal human trafficking syndicates, further disempowering immigrants. While we did not find any cases of religious organizations being involved in this economy, Souza Alves’s work on the interaction between religious and business networks among Brazilians points to the need to examine more carefully the explicit and indirect links between religion and economics in new destinations. In sum, religious congregations provide vital “spaces of sociability” for some immigrants but not for most. Instead, intermediate spaces between private and public spheres appear to be at least as significant for religious practice. Public expressions of popular religion, such as fiestas patronales, take place in some new destinations but often face important spatial obstacles in others. Moreover, while religion may be “the ultimate border crosser,” the portability of religion should not be simply assumed given the mobile livelihoods of some immigrants. And finally, although transnational fiestas like the Fiesta Maya provide immigrants with the opportunity to reaffirm their ethnic identity and strengthen transnational connections, they also celebrate “what is not”—the family members who are absent, the legal status that is out of reach, the improbability of returning home. In this sense, religion is as much about opening wounds as it is about healing.

Looking Ahead When we began research, we initially envisioned a study divided into two phases: the first one would map out the configuration of Latino communities in Florida, characterizing their religious beliefs, practices, and institutions. The second phase would trace the transnational civic, cultural, and religious networks that these communities maintain with their countries of origin. During the course of the research we discovered that changes in the post-/ (September , ) immigration climate, together with the fact that these communities are either too nascent or too economically and socially vulnerable, have made it difficult for them to build sustained and intensive transnational ties. We found that most immigrants prefer to remain invisible or to “hunker down” in ethnic enclaves rather than engage in organized collective action. In fact, the key challenge facing the Latino immigrants we studied has shifted toward securing their survival in the United States in what has become an increasingly hostile environment. This was exemplified by the conflict around the creation of a labor center in Jupiter. As religious leaders and nonprofits worked with town staff to regularize the employment of day-laborers through the creation of an employment and resource center, anti-immigrant groups

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(including the Federation for American Immigration Reform, FAIR) came in to mobilize opposition among the Euro-American population. In the process, all kinds of derogatory stereotypes about Latinos, and immigrants in general, came to the fore, fueling misunderstandings and tensions. In response to these types of conflicts, it makes sense that future research in non-conventional sites of migration should shift the focus from transnationalism per se to the “politics of encounter,” the inter-ethnic, inter-racial, and inter-faith tensions and relations between immigrants and natives and among immigrant groups settling in the same spaces. This is not to suggest that we abandon a transnational framework that is attentive to the multiple relations that Latino immigrants maintain with their societies of origin. In fact, our study demonstrates that the level of transnationalism is strongly conditioned by the context of reception of particular immigrant groups. Conversely, as the Guatemalan case highlights, for immigrants in new destinations, transnational networks and social remittances might be the go-to resources to build meaningful places to be in the face of precarious and hostile local conditions in the United States. However, in addition to focusing on the local and translocal world views and practices of immigrants, we need to pay increasing attention to the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors that the broader communities of reception express vis-à-vis Latino immigrants. In particular, we need to explore how Euro-Americans and African Americans see Latino immigrants and how Latino immigrants respond to these perceptions with their own forms of selfidentification and strategic representations of the native “others.” Moreover, we need to know what, if anything, religion contributes to these processes of identity construction. Our study showed that religious narratives and institutions are central to these processes of identity formation among Latinos and that religion can be both part of the problem and part of the solution. Thus, looking ahead, it is important to continue the focus on lived religion but concentrate more on the roles religion and culture play in generating, mediating, and resolving intergroup conflicts. Given the highly polarized debates about immigration at the national and local levels, we need to look for models of religious and civic organization that have been successful in bridging divisions and fostering communication and even multiracial cross-cultural alliances. This effort takes on even greater importance in the face of a deteriorating economy, especially in the hard-hit housing, construction, and service sectors, which provide significant employment opportunities to Latin American immigrants. In the post-/ climate, the economic recession is likely to fuel even more immigrant scapegoating and inter-ethnic strife. Moreover, with the continued failure of the federal government to pass rational, comprehensive, balanced, and humane immigration reform, local conflicts are likely to intensify, particularly in states like Georgia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, which

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have only recently experienced substantial immigration from Latin America. Indeed, many cities and towns in these states have sought to deal unilaterally with the problem of undocumented immigration by passing a host of draconian ordinances that limit the number of tenants that can live in a housing unit, deny driver’s licenses to those who do not have the proper documentation, or penalize employers who hire unauthorized workers. The net effect of these ordinances has been to generate great anxiety among already precarious immigrant “communities,” forcing them further into the shadows and encouraging reliance on submerged transnational networks to support the arduous process of settlement. This appeal to transnationalism, in turn, further inflames the nativist sentiments of U.S.-born local populations. Despite this ominous scenario, the success of El Sol Resource Center in Jupiter, Florida, shows that along with conflict come promising initiatives that point to the emergence of what Putnam calls a more “capacious sense of ‘we,’ a reconstruction of diversity that does not bleach out ethnic specificities, but creates overarching identities that ensure that those specificities do not trigger the allergic, ‘hunker down’ reaction.” A focus on new destinations can bring these models into the national debate, thus helping to counteract the vociferous exclusionary and nativist rhetoric that is at odds with the increasing diversity of American society and its deeper engagement with globalization.

NOTES

. Maxine Margolis, Little Brazil: An Ethnography of Brazilian Immigrants in New York City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). . Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller, “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society,” International Migration Review  (): –. . Peggy Levitt and Mary C. Waters, introduction to The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation, ed. Peggy Levitt and Mary C. Waters (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, ), . . Thomas Faist, “Transnationalization in International Migration: Implications for the Study of Citizenship and Culture,” Ethnic and Racial Studies , no.  (): –. . Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). This lack of transnational community in the case of Brazilians might be a function of the newness of the settlement. The great diversity of Brazilian migration to the county, especially in terms of region of origin and class, and the spatial dispersion in Broward County are also contributing factors. . For an example of the limited psychological literature addressing these questions see Celia J. Falicof, “Working with Transnational Immigrants: Expanding Meanings of Family, Community, and Culture,” Family Process , no.  (June ): –. . When migrants make plans to return home, they frequently do so secretly to avoid becoming the victims of robbery in Guatemala. As the number of deported and returning migrants has soared over the past two years, the returnees have become targets of organized crime not only in the capital but also in the outlying areas of Huehuetenango.

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. For an excellent example of this process see Sarah Mahler, “Transnational Relationships: The Struggle to Communicate across Borders,” Identities , no.  (): –. . Robert Orsi, The Madonna of th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, – (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), xviii. . Luin Goldring defines migrant-led transnationalism as “migrant-initiated practices and institutions that foster transnational social spaces.” Luin Goldring, “The Mexican State and Transmigrant Organizations: Negotiating the Boundaries of Membership and Participation,” Latin American Research Review  (): . . See Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick, City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). . Peggy Levitt, “You Know, Abraham Was Really the First Immigrant: Religion and Transnational Migration,” International Immigration Review  (): –. . Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, ). . Roger Rouse, “Thinking through Transnationalism: Notes on the Cultural Politics of Class Relations in Contemporary United States,” Public Culture  (): . . Religious and business networks have played prominent roles in other immigrant communities as well. Similarly, these networks can produce highly exploitative relations between immigrants. For a discussion of this phenomenon among Salvadoran immigrants in Long Island, see Sarah Mahler, American Dreaming: Immigrant Life at the Margins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ). . Robert Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies  (): –. . Daniel Levine and David Stoll, “Bridging the Gap between Empowerment and Power in Latin America,” in Transnational Religion and Fading States, ed. Susanne Rudolph and James Piscatori, – (Boulder: Westview Press, ). . Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Also see Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, ). . See David A. Snow, “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation,” American Sociological Review  (August ): –; and David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization,” in International Social Movements Research (Greenwich: JAI Press, ), :–. . McAdam, Political Process. For a review of some of this literature, also see Mayer N. Zald, “Theological Crucibles: Social Movements in and of Religion,” Review of Religious Research  (): . . On resource mobilization see John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology  (May ): –; Anthony Oberschall, Social Conflict and Social Movements (New York: Prentice Hall, ). . Charlie Savage, “Hispanic Evangelical Offering GOP a Bridge to the Future,” Boston Globe, March , , A. We found the same views expressed by Pentecostals in Jupiter. At the very least, these findings suggest the need for further research on the question of whether evangelical Protestant immigrants are less transnational and more “assimilated” than other immigrants. . Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in Lived Religion in America, ed. David Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . . See Nancy Ammerman, Congregation and Community (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press ); and Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady,

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Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, ). . This is the subtitle of Grace Davie’s book on religion in Britain during the postwar period. Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since : Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, ). . Peggy Levitt, God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape (New York: New Press, ), . . Orsi, The Madonna of th Street, xxii–xxiii. . Jay Dolan, The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, – (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, ). . Manuel A. Vásquez, “Studying Mobile Religions: A Networks Approach,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion , no.  (): –. . Orsi, The Madonna of th Street, . . Manuel A. Vásquez, Chad Seales, and Marie Friedmann Marquardt, “New Latino Destinations,” in Latinos/as in the United States: Changing the Face of America, ed. Havidán Rodríguez, Rogelio Sáenz, and Cecilia Menjívar, – (New York: Springer, ). . As Robert Orsi reminds us, scholars of lived religion would do well to take seriously the religious practice and imagination of the poorest and most marginalized immigrants. At the same time, in our propensity to relate stories of successful immigrant adaptation, we must be careful not to romanticize the empowerment of poor immigrants by vesting them with the agency formerly sought in the working class or, more recently, the subaltern subject. Robert Orsi, “How Do We Study the Lived Religion of Men and Women Who Don’t Have the Walls to Hang Their Religious Images On?” (paper presented at the Conference on Latinos in Florida: Lived Religion, Space, and Power, Antigua, Guatemala, December –, ). . Kenneth J. Guest, “Religion and Transnational Migration in the New Chinatown,” in Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America, ed. Karen I. Leonard et al. (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, ), . . Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: Perennial, ), . . Mahler, American Dreaming; Cecilia Menjívar, Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). . See David Kyle and Rey Koslowski, eds., Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). . Levitt, God Needs No Passport, . . Orsi, “How Do We Study.” . Ordinances directly targeting undocumented immigrants have surfaced in places as diverse as Avon Park, Florida; Hazleton, Pennsylvania; Arcadia, Wisconsin; Farmingville, New York; and Riverside, New Jersey. See David Fried, “Local Illegal Immigration Laws Draw a Diverse Group of Cities, NC Times, September , , http://www.nctimes.com/articles////news/top_stories/____.txt (accessed March , ). . Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum,” .

CONTRIBUTORS

PATRICIA FORTUNY LORET DE MOLA is a researcher in the Center of Research and Advanced Sciences in Social Anthropology (CIESAS)–Peninsular in Mérida, Mexico. She received her PhD in social anthropology from the University College London in . Since the s, she has studied religious minorities such as evangelicals, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses in Mexico. She has published a book on religious change, Creyentes y Creencias en Guadalajara (), and has done research among Mexican immigrants in the United States who belong to an important Mexican Pentecostal church. She has published numerous articles on diverse topics related to religion in Mexico and, most recently, among Mexican immigrants in the United States.

CAROL GIRÓN SOLÓRZANO received her Licenciatura in International Relations from the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala and is currently completing a master’s in human rights at the Universidad Rafael Landívar de Guatemala. Previously, she was a researcher for the Migration Program of FLACSO Guatemala (–). Currently, she is a founding member and researcher for the Instituto Centroamericano de Estudios Sociales y Desarrollo (INCEDES), which initiated its activities in .

SILVIA IRENE PALMA studied clinical psychology at the Universidad Rafael Landívar de Guatemala (–) and completed a master’s in social psychology at the UNAM–México (–) and a master’s in social development at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (–). She is currently pursuing a PhD in sociology at the Universidad Pontifícia de Salamanca/Programa Guatemala. She was coordinator of the Migration Program for FLACSO Guatemala (–). Since February , she is the executive director of the Instituto Centroamericano de Estudios Sociales y Desarrollo (INCEDES). She has numerous publications related to the issue of international migration in Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States.

LÚCIA RIBEIRO received her master’s in sociology (FLACSO-Chile, ) and pursued doctoral studies in sociology (Mexico City, Mexico, ). She worked as a researcher, in the areas of sexuality, reproduction, and religion in different

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organizations in Rio de Janeiro. Since , she is a member of the staff of ISER/ASSESSORIA (Rio de Janeiro). She is the author of several books, including Entre o desejo e o mistério: Novos caminhos da sexualidade (), Entre (in)certezas e contradições: Práticas reprodutivas entre mulheres das Comunidades Eclesiais de Base da Igreja Católica (), and Sexualidade e reprodução: O que os padres dizem e o que deixam de dizer (). She recently coauthored, with Leonardo Boff, Masculino/Feminino: Experiências vividas ().

MIRIAN SOLÍS LIZAMA is a master’s student in regional development at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte. She received her Licenciatura in anthropological sciences with a specialization in social anthropology from the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán. She has participated in a number of research projects focused on international migration, including Yucatecos en el Norte, funded by CONACyT; the Proyecto Tunkás, supported by the Ford Foundation; and Latino Immigrants in South Florida: Lived Religion, Space, and Power, coordinated by the University of Florida.

JOSÉ CLAÚDIO SOUZA ALVES is a professor of sociology and dean of Extension Programs for the Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro. He received his PhD in sociology from the Universidade de São Paulo. He is the author of Dos Barões ao Extermínio: Uma História da Violência na Baixada Fluminense.

TIMOTHY J. STEIGENGA is an associate professor of political science at the Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He is the author or editor of four books and numerous other publications on religion, politics, and immigration, including Conversion of a Continent: Contemporary Religious Change in Latin America (), Resurgent Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change (), and The Politics of the Spirit: The Political Implications of Pentecostalized Religion in Costa Rica and Guatemala (). In , he was honored to serve for six months in Guatemala as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar.

MANUEL A. VÁSQUEZ is an associate professor of religion and co-director of the Latin American Immigrants in the New South Project at the University of Florida. He is author of The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity () and coauthor of Globalizing the Sacred: Religion across the Americas (). He has also coedited Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas () and Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America ().

PHILIP J. WILLIAMS is a professor of political science and co-director of the Latin American Immigrants in the New South Project at the University of

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Florida. He is author of The Catholic Church and Politics in Nicaragua and Costa Rica () and coauthor of Militarization and Demilitarization in El Salvador’s Transition to Democracy (). He has also coedited Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas () and published numerous articles in journals such as Comparative Politics, Journal of Church and State, Journal of Latin American Studies, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Latino Studies.

INDEX

Italicized page numbers refer to tables. Abacoa (Jupiter, Fla.), , –, , , – African Americans, , , ,  African-based religions, –, –, , n,  agricultural economy, –, , –, ; and collective mobilization, –, ; and concept of family in Jupiter, ; and gender, , –, –, , , , n; in Immokalee vs. Jupiter, –, ; and lived religion in Immokalee, –, –; and solidarities in Immokalee, , –, –, n, n, n Al-Ali, Nadje,  alcohol use. See drinking; substance abuse aldeas, ,  Ammerman, Nancy,  amnesty, –,  Anglo-Americans, , –, , –. See also Euro-Americans anomie, , n, –n,  anti-immigrant climate, , , , , , , , , –. See also hostile environments Appadurai, Arjun, , n, , n Assemblies of God, , –, , –, –, n,  assimilation, n, , n, , , , –, n associational life, , –, –, –,  asylum seekers. See refugees/asylum seekers Augé, Marc, – autonomy, personal, , , , , ; and gender, –, , , , n,  Avila, Ernestine,  Baiano Catholics, , n baptisms, –, –, , ,  Baptist Church, , , –, , , ,  Basch, Linda, , – base communities, , . See also Ecclesial Base Communities (CEBs)

“believing without belonging,” , n, , n, , n Benedict XVI, Pope,  Benford, Robert, n Benitez, Lucas, ,  Berger, Oscar, , n, ,  Berkowitz, S. D.,  Bethel Assembly of God Church (Immokalee, Fla.), –, –, n,  bifocality, , , ,  bonding social capital, –; and collective mobilization, , , , n; and concept of family in Jupiter, ; and lived religion in Immokalee, , ; and Otomí immigrants in Immokalee, , , ,  Booth, John,  Bourdieu, Pierre, , , n Bourne, Randolph,  Bowling Alone (Putnam),  boycotts, –, , nn,, ,  Brady, Henry,  Brazilian Apostolate, – Brazilian Baptist Church, ,  Brazilian Catholic Mission of South Florida,  Brazilian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CNBB),  Brazilian immigrants, , , , –, –, , –, –, n; and gender, –, –, –, –, n, nn,; and immigrant regime of production, –; and interpersonal networks, –, n, n Brazilian Mission of South Florida,  bridging social capital, , , –; and collective mobilization, , , , n; and concept of family in Jupiter, , ; and lived religion in Immokalee, , n Briz, Jorge, n, ,  Broward County (Fla.), , –, nn,, –, , , , , –, n Brown, Karen McCarthy,  brujo (traditional healer), –,  Burawoy, Michael,  Burns, Allan, –, – 231

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INDEX

Bush, George W., n, , ,  business networks, –, , –, , , n Candomblé, , –,  capitalism, , , n, , , , , , ; and immigrant regime of production, –, , ,  cargo system, ,  carnaval, , n Carrington, Peter, –,  Castells, Manuel, –nn,, ,  Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR), –. See also Charismatic Renewal Movement Catholic Charities, –n, –, , ,  Catholic Church, , , nn,, –, –; and collective mobilization, –; and concept of family in Jupiter, , –, –n; and concept of home in Jupiter, –, , , , –; and gender, –, –, n; and immigrant regime of production, , , –, , ; and interpersonal networks, , –, –, , n; and lived religion in Immokalee, –, –, –, , , nn,,; and solidarities in Immokalee, –, , n cell phones, , , , , ,  cells, , , n Chamacuarenses, –, –, nn–,,  Chamácuaro (Guanajuato), ; and collective mobilization, –, n; and gender, ; and lived religion in Immokalee, –, n; and solidarities in Immokalee, –, –, , n charismatic Christianity, , ; and concept of family in Jupiter, –; and concept of home in Jupiter, , , –; and gender, , , ; and immigrant regime of production, ; and interpersonal networks, –, , n Charismatic Renewal Movement, ,  charity, –, ,  Chesnut, R. Andrew,  Chiapanecos, –, – Chiapas (Mexico), , –, , –, , –, ,  Chinese immigrants,  churches. See religious organizations City on the Edge (Portes and Stepick),  civic organizations, , –, ; and collective mobilization, , , ; and concept of family in Jupiter, , –, n; and concept of home in Jupiter, –; and lived religion in Immokalee, – civic skills, –, , , , n, – civil wars, , , , , ,  clans, –, n

class relations, , , , , , , , , n; and collective mobilization in Immokalee, , , ; and solidarities in Immokalee, , , n Clearwater (Fla.), –, ,  Coalición Jacalteca de Jupiter,  Coalition of Immokalee Workers, –, , n, , –; and collective mobilization, –, , nn,; and lived religion in Immokalee, –, – collective identities, , n, , –, , , ; and collective mobilization, , , ; and concept of home in Jupiter, , –, –; and immigrant regime of production, –; and interpersonal networks, , –, –n; and solidarities in Immokalee,  collective mobilization, –, –, , , , –; and concept of home in Jupiter, –, , –; and immigrant regime of production, , –, ; in Immokalee, –; in Jupiter, – Colombians, , ,  community, , , , –, , , n, n, , –, , –, n; and interpersonal networks, –, , , –, nn,; and solidarities in Immokalee, – Community Foundation,  Community Investment Program (CIP),  community organizing. See collective mobilization community projects, , , , –, –,  co-nationals, , , , –, . See also paisanos congregations, –, n, –; and immigrant regime of production, , , ; and interpersonal networks, , , , ; and lived religion in Immokalee, –, , –, n connective structures, , n construction industries, , ; and collective mobilization, , ; and concept of family in Jupiter, , –, n; and concept of home in Jupiter, ; and immigrant regime of production, , , ; and solidarities in Immokalee, – “coordinates of the possible,” , ,  Corn-Maya, Inc.: and collective mobilization, –, –, ; and concept of family, , –n; and concept of home, –, , , , –, n cosmo-logistical problem, – coyotes, –, , , ,  criminalization of immigrants, , –. See also anti-immigrant climate Cristero Rebellion, n, , n Cristo Rompe las Cadenas (Palm Beach County, Fla.), 

INDEX

Cubans, , –, , n, –, , n Cuban Santería,  DaMatta, Roberto, – Dance of the Deer, –,  Davie, Grace, n, n, n day-laborers, , –, –nn–, , , , n, , ,  dead, return of, , , , –, , ,  debts, –, , , ,  de Certeau, Michel, , – DECOPAZ/PNUD-UNOPS,  Deerfield Beach (Fla.), , , , –, –, –, , , , ,  defensive identities, , –nn, de la Peña, Guillermo,  DeRogatis, Amy,  deterritorialization, , n diasporas, , , , , –,  Diocese of Venice,  discrimination, , n; and collective mobilization, –, , –; in Jupiter vs. Immokalee, , –, , n; and lived religion in Immokalee,  domestic violence, , , , –,  Dominicans, , – “domus,” n,  downward assimilation, , ,  drinking: and collective mobilization, –; and concept of family in Jupiter, , , ; and concept of home in Jupiter, , , ; and gender, , ; and immigrant regime of production, , ; and interpersonal networks, ; and lived religion in Immokalee, –, ; and solidarities in Immokalee, , . See also substance abuse driver’s licenses, n, , ,  drug use, –, ,  Durand, Jorge,  Durkheim, Émile, , –n Ecclesial Base Communities (CEBs),  economic immigrants, –, n,  education, , n, , , , , , ; and concept of family in Jupiter, , , , , , n; and gender, , ,  El Sol Neighborhood Resource Center, –nn–,, –, , n, –, , , –, ,  e-mail, , , , ,  Emirbayer, Mustafa,  English language, ; and concept of family in Jupiter, , –; and immigrant regime of production, , ; and solidarities in Immokalee, , , n, n entrepreneurs, religious, , ,  ethnic divisions, –, , , –, , , 

233

Euro-Americans, –, , , , , , ,  evangelical Christianity, , n, –, n; and concept of family in Jupiter, –; and concept of home in Jupiter, , , , , –; and gender, –, , nn,,; and immigrant regime of production, –, –; and interpersonal networks, , –, ; and lived religion in Immokalee, , n Evangelical Church of Kanjobal (Lake Worth, Fla.),  exploitation, , , , n; and collective mobilization, , –; and immigrant regime of production, –, , , , ; and interpersonal networks, , ; and solidarities in Immokalee, ,  Faist, Thomas, , n families, , –, –; and concept of family in Jupiter, –, , , , , n; and concept of home in Jupiter, –; and gender, , , , ; and immigrant regime of production, , –; and interpersonal networks, –, , –, , n; in Jupiter vs. Immokalee, –, , , ; and lived religion in Immokalee, –, –, , ; and solidarities in Immokalee, , – farmworkers. See agricultural economy Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), , ,  Fernandez-Kelly, Patricia,  Fiesta de la Santa Cruz, –, nn,, –, –,  La Fiesta de la Virgen de Candelaria, , , –, ,  Fiesta de Santa Teresa, , n, . See also fiestas patronales Fiesta Maya, , –, ; and collective mobilization, –, –, ; and concept of family, –; and concept of home, –, –, –, n fiestas patronales, , –, –, nn,, n, –, , ,  Fink, Leon, ,  Florida Atlantic University, , , , , –,  Foley, Michael, , n, n, n, n Fortuny Loret de Mola, Patricia, , –, , –, –, ,  Foucault, Michel, ,  Fraser, Nancy, n Freston, Paul,  Friends of El Sol, –n, –, – gambling, ,  gateways, –, , –, , , , , 

234

INDEX

gender, –, –, , , ; and collective mobilization, ; and concept of family in Jupiter, , –, , , , ; and interpersonal networks, , –, n, n, n; and lived religion in Immokalee, , n; and solidarities in Immokalee, , n “German Ideology, The” (Marx),  Giddens, Anthony,  Gilroy, Paul,  Girón Solórzano, Carol, –, –,  Glick Schiller, Nina, , , –,  globalization, , –, , , , –, n, , , , –,  globalization from below, , , , n. See also grassroots globalizations Goldring, Luin, n, n Gonzales, Juan, –,  Goodwin, Jeff,  gossip, transnational, , , , – Granovetter, Mark,  grassroots globalizations, , , n, , n grupo social,  Guadalupe Center (Immokalee, Fla.),  Guanajuato (Mexico), , ; and collective mobilization, , –, ; and gender, ; and lived religion in Immokalee, , –, , n, n; and solidarities in Immokalee, –, –, – Guarnizo, Luis, , n,  Guatemalan Coalition, , n Guatemalan immigrants, , , , –, –, , –, , n; and collective mobilization, –; and concept of family in Jupiter, –, , , n; and concept of home in Jupiter, –, n; demographics of, –, –nn,, –, –; in Jupiter vs. Immokalee, –, , , , , , , nn,; and lived religion in Immokalee, –, , ; and lived religion in Jupiter, –, –, , n Guatemalan-Maya Center, Inc.,  Guest, Kenneth,  Gusfield, Joseph, n Haitians, , , n, , –,  Hall, Alan, –,  Hall, David, n Hidalgo (Mexico), , –; and collective mobilization, –, n; and lived religion in Immokalee, , ; and solidarities in Immokalee, , –, , n,  hñahñus, , –, , n Hoge, Dean, , n, n, n, n Holy Week, , n home, –, nn,, –, –, , ,  home altars, , , , 

hometown associations, –, n, –, , ,  Homo anomicus, , , –n homosexuality,  Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette, , ,  horizontal linkages, , n hostile environments, , , –, –, , , –; and collective mobilization, , , –, n; and concept of home in Jupiter, , ; and immigrant regime of production, , ; and lived religion in Immokalee, ,  housecleaning services, , , , , –, , ,  Huehuetenango (Guatemala), , –, , –, n human trafficking,  identity politics, –, –nn,, ,  ideology of disunity, , ,  Iglesia Betel. See Bethel Assembly of God Church (Immokalee, Fla.) Iglesia Elim (Palm Beach County, Fla.),  Iglesia La Luz del Mundo (Guadalajara, Mexico),  Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil),  immigrant regime of production, , –, –, , ,  immigrant rights, , , ,  immigration laws/reform, n, ; and concept of family in Jupiter, , n; and immigrant regime of production, , , ; and interpersonal networks, , , n; and lived religion in Immokalee, ,  Immokalee (Fla.), , , –, , –, –, ; and collective mobilization, –; and gender, –, –, , –; vs. Jupiter, –, , , , , , , nn,; and lived religion, –, , ; and solidarities, –, n, n in-between religious spaces. See intermediate spaces INCEDES (Central American Institute for Social Research and Development),  income, , n; and concept of family in Jupiter, , , , nn,; and gender, –, , –, –; and immigrant regime of production, –; in Jupiter vs. Immokalee, , –; and lived religion in Immokalee,  Indiantown (Fla.), , –,  indigenous groups, , , –, –, n, , , , . See also Otomí immigrants infidelity, –, , , – Institutional Act  (Brazil),  intermediate spaces, , , , , , –, n, –,  International Monetary Fund,  Internet, , , , , , , 

INDEX

interpersonal networks, –, –, n, –, , –,  invisibility, , , , , , , , ,  Irish immigrants, – Italian immigrants, n, , , , , n, n, – Itzigsohn, José,  Jacaltecs. See Mayan immigrants Jacaltenango (Guatemala), –, –, ; and collective mobilization, –; and concept of family, –, n; and concept of home, –, –, – Jiménez, Tomás,  John Paul II, Pope, , , n,  Johnston, Hank, n Josephs, Aileen, n Juárez Cerdi, Elizabeth,  Jupiter (Fla.), , , –, –, –, –, , , n; and collective mobilization, –, –; and concept of family, –, n; and concept of home, –; vs. Immokalee, –, , , , , , , nn, Jupiter Neighbors against Illegal Labor (JNAIL), ,  Kanjobal Mayans, ,  Keck, Margaret, n kinship networks, , n, –, , ,  Koser, Khalid,  labor markets, , , –; and collective mobilization, –, , , n; and concept of family in Jupiter, –, , –nn–; and concept of home in Jupiter, –, ; and gender, –, ; and immigrant regime of production, –, –, –; in Jupiter vs. Immokalee, ; and solidarities in Immokalee, , , . See also agricultural economy; construction industries; service-based economy labor unions, , , ,  Lake Worth (Fla.), , , ,  Laraña, Enrique, n latent networks, ,  Levine, Daniel,  Levitt, Peggy, –, , , n, , , , , –, , , – liberation theology, , ,  linkages, transnational, , , n, , , , –,  lived experience, , n lived religion, –, , –, , n, , –; and concept of home in Jupiter, –, –, , n; and gender, –; in Immokalee, –, , , n lived spaces, –,  Lorentzen, Lois,  Low, Setha, 

235

Machado, Dores C., n Madonna of th Street, The (Orsi),  Maduro, Otto, n Mahler, Sarah, ,  Margolis, Maxine, –, –, –,  marimbas, , –, –,  Marquardt, Marie, , , , n Martes, Ana Cristina, , –, –,  Martínez Casas, Regína,  Marx, Karl, ,  Massey, Douglas,  master frames, , , , n,  Maya Jacaltec Association, , –, –, –,  Mayan immigrants, , , –, –; and collective mobilization, –, –, ; and concept of family, –, –n; and concept of home, –, n; in Jupiter vs. Immokalee, –, –. See also Guatemalan immigrants mayordomos, ,  McAdam, Doug, –n McDonald’s, , , ,  Melucci, Alberto,  men. See gender Menchu, Rigoberta,  Menjívar, Cecilia, , , n,  mestizos, –, –, –, n Mexican immigrants, , –, , , –, , –, –, –; and collective mobilization, –, –; demographics of, –, –; and gender, –, –, –, n; in Immokalee vs. Jupiter, –, , , , , , , nn,; and lived religion in Immokalee, –, , ; and solidarities, –, nn,,  migrant workers, –, –, , . See also agricultural economy; undocumented immigration Ministério de Boston (Assemblies of God),  missionaries, –,  mobile livelihoods, , n money transfer agencies, –, ,  moral communities, transnational, , , n, , –, n, n,  Mormons, , , n multiple embeddedness, –, – multiple marginalities, , n Murrow, Edward R.,  National Conference of Catholic Bishops,  Nations Unbound (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc), ,  Native Americans, , –n nativism, , , , . See also hostile environments negotiated transnational religious organizations, , , , ,  new destinations, –, –, –, , , , –, , –, –

236

INDEX

neo-Pentecostalism, , , –, , , n, n New Paradigm (NP), –,  newspapers, , ,  Nieves, Elias del Socorro, , n / terrorist attacks, –,  non-places, – nonprofit organizations, , , –, –, , , . See also names of nonprofits Nossa Senhora Aparecida Catholic Church, , , ,  Novaes, Regina,  Oaxaca (Mexico), , , –, , , , , ,  O’Dea, Thomas, –, n O que faz o Brasil, Brasil (DaMatta),  orixás (ancestor spirits), – Orsi, Robert, , n, , , , , , , – Otomí immigrants, –, –; and collective mobilization, –, n; and lived religion in Immokalee, –; and solidarities in Immokalee, , –, n,  Our Lady of Guadalupe (Immokalee, Fla.), – pai de santo, –,  paisanos, –, , –, n, , . See also co-nationals paletería, , nn, Palma, Lázaro, –, n Palma, Silvia Irene, –, –,  Pan-Mayan movements, , , – peasants, –, , –, n,  Pentecostal churches, , , n; and concept of home in Jupiter, , ; and gender, –, , –, nn,, n; and interpersonal networks, , ; and lived religion in Immokalee, , , –, , n personal networks. See interpersonal networks Pessar, Patricia,  Peterson, Anna L., n,  Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, –, n, ,  Pew Hispanic Center, –, n, ,  pinteras/os, , n, , n pluralism, religious, –, , ,  Poblete, Renato, –, n Pompano Beach (Fla.), , , , –, –, –, , , , ,  Popkin, Eric, ,  popular publics, –, n popular religion, , n, , , n, –, n, , ,  Portes, Alejandro, , , , , n, , n, n, , , , , –, n, , n, 

Portillo, Alfonso,  Portuguese language, , , –,  poverty, , , , , ,  prayer groups, , , , , , , , , n, – private spaces, , ; and gender, , , , ; and immigrant regime of production, –; and interpersonal networks, , –, , n; and lived religion in Immokalee, , –,  production. See immigrant regime of production project identities, , n Proposition  (Calif.), ,  Protestant evangelical churches. See evangelical Christianity public spaces, –, , , , , –, , , , , – public transportation, –, , ,  Puerto Ricans, , , , n, n,  Putnam, Robert, , , , n,  quest culture, n quinceañeras, , ,  radio transmissions, –, , , , , ,  reactive ethnicity, , –; and collective mobilization, –, , , , , –, n; and concept of home in Jupiter, , ; and lived religion in Immokalee, , n; and Otomí immigrants in Immokalee, , n,  re-created images of home, , –, –, , ,  refugees/asylum seekers, –, , , , , , , , , ,  religious de-institutionalization,  religious organizations, –, , –, n, n, –, –, n; and collective mobilization, –, –, –, , n; and concept of family in Jupiter, , , –, –nn,; and concept of home in Jupiter, –, –, nn,; and gender, –, nn,,–, n; and immigrant regime of production, –; and interpersonal networks, , , –, –, n, n; in Jupiter vs. Immokalee, –, ; and lived religion in Immokalee, –, –, –, nn,, n, nn,; and solidarities in Immokalee, , –, –, nn,, n. See also names of religious denominations remittances, , n, , , , , , ; and concept of family in Jupiter, , –, , –, , , n; and concept of home in Jupiter, –, –; and interpersonal networks, –, ; and solidarities in Immokalee, –, –

INDEX

resource center. See El Sol Neighborhood Resource Center reunification of families, –, , ,  revival movement (avivamento),  Ribeiro, Lúcia, , –, – Richards, Patricia,  Rincón, Josué, – Roof, Wade Clark, n Rouse, Roger, ,  Rubin, Ettore, ,  Rumbaut, Rubén, , n, –, n, n Sabbagh, Jocelyn,  sacred mission, –, –, n Sales, Teresa, , n,  Salvadorans, , , n, , , n, , , n Sanders, Richard,  San Isidro Association,  Santa Teresa Davoxtha, –, n, n Santa Teresita de Jesús, – Scalabrini Order, , –, , n scale shifts, –, –n Schlozman, Kay,  secularization, –, nn,, n, , , , ,  SEGEPLAN,  selling of houses (venda de casas), ,  Sensenbrenner bill (H.R. ), – September , , terrorist attacks, –,  service-based economy, , , , , ; and concept of family in Jupiter, , –, n; and gender, –, , ; and immigrant regime of production, , –, ; and solidarities in Immokalee, ,  Seventh-Day Adventists, , n signature drives, – Sikkink, Kathryn, n sister city agreement, –, n, –,  Six L’s Packing Company,  Skocpol, Theda,  small businesses, , , –, , , n Smilde, David, –, n Smith, Michael P., , n,  Smith, Robert, n Snow, David, n soccer leagues/tournaments, , –, , , –, , , ,  sociability, –, , –, , n, , . See also spaces of sociability social capital, , –, , –, , ; and collective mobilization, –, –, n, n; and concept of family in Jupiter, , , –; and gender, , , , ; and immigrant regime of production, –; and

237

interpersonal networks, , , ; in Jupiter vs. Immokalee, –, –, n; and lived religion in Immokalee, , , , –, n, nn,; and solidarities in Immokalee, –, –, –, , nn–. See also bonding social capital; bridging social capital social control, , , , , n,  social fields, transnational, –, , , ; and concept of home in Jupiter, –, ; and immigrant regime of production, –; and interpersonal networks, –, , ; in Jupiter vs. Immokalee, ; and solidarities in Immokalee, , n social justice, , , , – social movements, , –, , , , , n, –, , –. See also names of social movements social networks, –, ; and collective mobilization, , , ; and gender, , ; and lived religion in Immokalee, , , ; and solidarities in Immokalee, –,  social remittances, , , , , , , –, , –,  solidarity, , –, , , , ; and collective mobilization, , –, –, –, n; and concept of home in Jupiter, –, ; and immigrant regime of production, –, ; and interpersonal networks, –, –, , –, n, n; and lived religion in Immokalee, –; and Mexican immigrants in Immokalee, –, nn, Solís Lizama, Mirian, , –, –,  solos, , n Souza Alves, José Claúdio, , , , –, , –,  spaces of sociability, , , –, , ,  Spiritism, –, , –, –,  spontaneous solidarities, – stable husbands,  Steigenga, Timothy J., –, –, –, , –, –,  Stein, Eduardo, , n,  Stepick, Alex, , , n, n St. Ignatius Loyola Church (Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.), – Stoll, David,  St. Peter’s Catholic Church (Jupiter, Fla.), –, , ,  Student Farmworker Alliance (SFA), , n subordination, , –, , , ,  substance abuse, , , ,  suicide attempts,  support networks, , , , , , , ,  syncretism, , , n Szanton Blanc, Cristina, , 

238

INDEX

Taco Bell, –, , ,  tandas, , n Tarrow, Sidney, n, , –n telephone communications, , , , ; and concept of family in Jupiter, , , –, nn,; and concept of home in Jupiter, , , –; and interpersonal networks, –; and solidarities in Immokalee, –, ,  television transmissions, , , , ,  Templo de Adoración Familiar (Palm Beach County, Fla.),  Tepeyac Mission, ,  terreiros (religious centers), –, – Tilly, Charles, –n time-space scales, , , , –, , ,  tomato production, ; and collective mobilization, –, ; and gender, –, , , n; and lived religion in Immokalee, , ; and solidarities in Immokalee, , n Tonnies, Ferdinand, n Totonicapán dancers, , ,  “Transnational America” (Bourne),  transnationalism, –, –, –, , nn,, , –, , –; and collective mobilization, –, , –, nn,, –; and concept of family in Jupiter, –, , –, , –; and concept of home in Jupiter, –, –; core transnationalism, , n, ; expanded transnationalism, , n; and immigrant regime of production, –, –, –; and interpersonal networks, –, –, n, nn,; and lived religion in Immokalee, , , –; and solidarities in Immokalee, , –, –, nn,; transnationalism from below, , n, –,  Trillium Asset Management, n Tweed, Thomas, n, n Umbanda, –, – undocumented immigration, –, n, , –, , , , n; and concept of family in Jupiter, , ; and immigrant regime of production, , –, , –; and interpersonal

networks, , ; and lived religion in Immokalee, , ; and solidarities in Immokalee, – Vásquez, Manuel A., –, , , –, n, , , , , , –, ,  Veracruz (Mexico), , ,  Verba, Sidney,  vertical linkages, , n via crucis, ,  videos, –, , , , , , , , , – Villarreal, Magdalena,  Virgin of Candelaria, , , –,  Virgin of Guadalupe, , –, , n Virgin of Juquila,  Wacquant, Loic, , n Warner, Stephen, ,  Waters, Mary,  Weber, Max,  Wellman, Barry, , –,  Wilkes Honors College (Florida Atlantic Univ.), ,  Williams, Philip J., –, –, –, , , –, , –, – Williams, Raymond,  witchcraft (mal de puesto), –, ,  women. See gender Wood, Richard,  work, , ; and concept of family in Jupiter, –, –nn–; and gender, –, –, –, nn,; and immigrant regime of production, –, , , –; and interpersonal networks, , –, –, n; and lived religion in Immokalee, –, –, –, ; and solidarities in Immokalee, –, . See also agricultural economy; construction industries; service-based economy World Bank,  World Revival Church (WRC-A.D.), – Wuthnow, Robert, n YUM Brands, –, 